Into The Realm

Valhalla-2

“That woman could gut and clean a fish faster than any man I had on board, including me,” my father would say before falling silent.

“Seems all of us Forrest men are good for is putting our women in the ground before their time,” Gramp would glumly add.

Having no way of knowing my mother, I rarely give her much thought except when I look at her picture. Dressed in all white, as she will always be in my mind, with long black hair pulled back in a fashionable braid of the times. The woman in the picture is small-boned with a pretty face which is unrecognizable to me, but for her eyes, which are sloping and deep-set as are mine, though I don’t know their true color.

Replacing the picture, I recross Valhalla breathing in the musty odor of Persian rugs in need of a good beating. An octagonal table, once used for spreading maps, sits on top of the rugs like some kind of sacrificial altar. Broad in circumference, the table takes up the center of the hall, surrounded by a circular bookcase holding the great works of their day. Most are first editions and written in their native tongue. I’ve read the majority, but there’s always a literary treasure waiting to be dusted off and discovered. I let my right hand run over the back of our Spanish leather couch, bruised with age yet heavy in its austerity. While doing so, I pass under a ship’s figurehead jutting out from the north wall.

The ‘Sea Witch’ is cloaked in a short chemise accentuating a swollen bosom. She was rescued by Captain Nehi after the taking an English gunboat while privateering for the colonies. And though she belonged to a British warship, the beguiler looks more like a Native American princess than she does a London pub maiden, which is why I’d taken to calling her ‘Poca,’ after John Smith’s Pocahontas. Whenever I’d pass beneath her, she’d always return my smile. Passing beneath her on this day, however, Poca appears strangely aloof and fails to give me her blessing.

Whaleboat captains of yesteryear are thought of today as daring and adventurous, but in their time, they were considered a scurrilous sort along with their crews. “Bottom of the Barrel” was how the Admiralty referred to them, but I’ve been told Captain Nehi was different. He was an explorer before he changed his sails over to whaling, so he knew the value of a fast, clean ship, and he had a brother. That’s where my family tree gets a bit cloudy. According to Gramp, rumor had it the brother sailed with Captain Cook when he rounded the Horn, and he had mapped his own charts in the South Seas before returning to the Cape and becoming a pirate, buccaneering many a Dutch, Moorish, French, and English vessel.

He supposedly ended his days languishing on the shores of the Ile Sainte-Marie, also known as the ‘Island of Wanted Men,’ located off the coast of Madagascar, and his name has been banished from the family’s history ever since. I don’t know it and neither has Gramp ever been told, though tales of him have sifted down through the generations even though the subject has always been taboo. One of these days I plan on taking a trip to the island and making a search of the cemeteries. Someone should say a few words over the poor sod. Hopefully, I’ll find my great-uncle and spill some rum over his grave and perhaps toss down a Spanish doubloon or two.

I start up the spiral metal staircase, itself salvaged from a captured WWI German U-boat stowed at Groton’s Naval Shipyards, where Gramp worked as a welder. Once a Mooncusser, always a Mooncusser! Stepping onto the narrow gangplank, I head for my room and am about to enter when an oblong object catches my eye. Placing both hands on the railing, I peer across the hall at a large oil painting hanging askew on the far wall, and although there are many such paintings adorning the house, I’ve never had the inclination to study this particular painting. It’s like I’m seeing it for the first time. Although I do recall Gramp saying to me the painting was completed in the early 1800s by an artist who may have been a relation, but we’ll never know because it went unsigned.

The painting appears larger than I remember it, more lifelike and grandiose. From my vantage point on the gangplank, I make the sailor to be a young man, perhaps my age, though his back is to the viewer with his face obscured, looking up at his wind-bent mast. Standing atop the stern, the sailor appears to be pushing the tiller to port using his left foot, with the mainsheet wrapped tightly around his right forearm. A sudden flash of lightning illuminates the sailor’s profile, and I can now make out the beginnings of a right eye socket along with the outline of a pronounced Roman nose. I notice the mains’l flutter near the masthead and I believe that I see a plume of sea spray break over the bow. More chain lightning flashes within the painting, followed by a delayed thunderclap. I tighten my grip on the railing and watch in denial as the sailor’s lone eyeball sweeps across the hall before locking its gaze on me.

I step away from the railing and pinch the bridge of my nose to clear my vision. Reopening my eyes, I see the painting how it actually is, only smaller and completely inanimate, with the sailor’s identity remaining obscured. It’s a neat trick and I’ll have to remember it when I have more time, but to be honest, the reality of it leaves me a little seasick, and I never get seasick.

Any and all nausea leaves me as I step into my bedroom and draw open the curtains. It’s not much of a room, and I wouldn’t call it grand, but it’s the only bedroom I’ve ever known except for the numberless pits I’ve bunked in whenever I’m at sea. I catch my reflection on my dresser’s attached mirror and stare at the ghostlike apparition looking back at me from within the foggy glass. I see that I’m not so tall, but rather on the short side, with a ruddy, sunbaked complexion from working long hours abovedecks. My hair has grown long and now balls about my shoulders from my year at sea, and I have a high bridge that I wouldn’t call Roman.

I’m not hard to look at, or at least I’m unique in appearance, and you wouldn’t know it by my wiry frame, but I’m as strong as a Flemish coil. The blood coursing through my veins seems to want to shoot from my fingertips, and I’ve often thought that if I were to grab a fistful of topknot, I could lift myself in the air and hold myself suspended indefinitely. It’s the kind of strength my father had, and Gramp has still and he’s pushing eighty. A family trait, you might say. It helps when I’m hauling hundred-pound gill net over the sides, but other than fishing, I’ve never had much use for it until a year ago. Only it wasn’t my strength that failed me, it was my conscience, and it’s been eating away at me every day since. What’s done is done, I keep telling myself and hopefully, after my meeting with the ranger, I’ll start to believe it.

I go to the sea chest at the foot of my bed and open it. I expected to find my oilskins folded neatly inside, only the chest was empty. I must have left them behind when I jumped ship last night, or was it the night before? Again, I don’t remember. No matter as the sun is up, the air balmy, and the July seas warm enough to take a plunge. What I will need on this day is my speargun that I find under my bed where I put it the night I hastily shipped out. Using great care, I bring the loaded gun up to sight and, cautiously unhooking the titanium-tipped spear from its aluminum housing, pull the trigger and release the vulcanized rubber slingshot, letting it slap harmlessly at the dusty air. Sheathing the spear in its webbed carryall with its five siblings, I grab my spare seabag and leave the room, closing the bedroom door as I found it.

Running down the spiral staircase, I recross Valhalla and take a sharp turn into Gramp’s storied Chart Room. Slipping around a large, standing globe, showing how the world once looked to seventeenth-century navigators, I sneak up to Gramp’s rolltop desk and take down his antique spyglass from its top slot. I’m not really sneaking per se, but I always feel that I am, and if I were to call the spyglass an antique in front of Gramp, he’d likely rap me over the head with it. I loop the brass chain over my head and let the spyglass dangle from my neck as I leave the room, making sure to close the door lest any of Gramp’s familiars gets inside and spray his precious charts. It’s the only room in the house they’re not allowed.

Reentering the kitchen, I am again struck by the squalor in which we bachelors allow ourselves to live: dirty dishes stacked in the sink to the point of overflowing, tiles stained brown, cupboards chipped and peeling, etc. Gramp tries to tidy up some, but it’s just not in him. He was a well-respected ship’s captain after all, and he’s getting on in years. What the house needs is a woman’s touch. Not that there hasn’t been a woman in the house, there have been plenty, but none recently.

Gramp’s wife, Flossy, was the last, and I’d heard from him and others that she ran a tight ship. It was Flossy who mostly raised my father when Gramp was away at sea, and it was my “Nana,” as I called her, who changed my diapers and fed me from the bottle when my father shipped out. But it was after Flossy passed from the ‘the cancer’ that Gramp began pulling at the cork. He’s no doubt at the Chatham Squire right now, drinking away the ‘grocery money’ I send him at the end of every month. If I were to fall into a bottomless pit, it wouldn’t matter much to him as long as he got his grocery money. I don’t believe this, of course, but I sometimes wonder.

I go to our refrigerator and open it. There’s not much there in terms of freshness so I close the door. Finding an empty milk jug in the trash can, I rinse it out and fill it with tap water, then, stepping up to our cupboard, I take out a round loaf of sourdough bread. Checking the bread for mold and finding none, I stuff the loaf into my seabag. Happening upon a bowl of apples, I take three. “Least he’s buying fresh fruit,” I say to myself, then toss the apples on top of the bread and leave by way of the hinge-less screen door, carefully replacing it, so as not to invite flies inside.