Far From The Sea We Know

by Frank Sheldon

  “Where does he get that strength from?”

  “No idea. But I did see Mary there.”

  “Served no time and got probation, right?”

  “Your father’s board at the Point didn’t want to attract unwanted attention, so they dropped the main charges.”

  “She got a wrist slap like I predicted.”

  “Yeah,” he said, yawning without trying to hide it, “you called it.”

  “Is Mary looking after Jack?”

  “Oh, yeah. There everyday. About the only person he can tolerate. Even though the place is private, it’s part of her required community service. Can you believe that? Somebody pulled a string, I guess.”

  “How is she?”

  “Wears a crucifix, carries a rosary. Looks more like a nun than ever, yet the damnedest thing is, she’s somehow even cuter.”

  He glanced at the oven. “That pie ready yet?”

  “Soon.” She could tell he had something else on his mind.

  “Do have one thing for you,” he said. “I still have to abide by my clearance obligations just like you, but I’m taking that to apply to everything that happened before my early retirement. I recently ran into an old friend from work. Over a few grasshoppers—hers, not mine—she mentioned that a satellite had picked up an image of the Valentina. I didn’t see it, but she told me it was a perfect match.”

  “Where?”

  “Off the coast of Argentina. Golfo Nuevo.”

  She was sure he noticed the look on her face, but didn’t try to hide it.

  “Penny, when you all got clearances, we did standard background checks. I know that’s where Captain Thorssen lost his wife. Valentina.”

  “He didn’t ‘lose’ her,” she shot back. “I was there when it happened. You know that, too, of course. Six years old. I was mad at her. She had promised me earlier she’d finally take me out on the sailboat she used for her whale research. Then she felt it was too rough. I was mad, and screamed that I hated her. And those were the last words she ever heard from me.”

  “I really am sorry.”

  “That’s not the point. She had been like my angel. I followed her around everywhere, wanted to be just like her. It never should have happened, not to her. It wasn’t a tragedy, it was a mistake, it was just wrong. She was special. Andrew and her together were special. The world just seemed to make sense when they were around. It was the only time it ever really did for me.”

  “It must have been terrible. And for him.”

  “It was.”

  “And I can see now, for you.”

  “I would give anything to be able to go back and change that day, to stop her from going! Eventually, I made a partial kind of peace with it, but I still wish I hadn’t screamed the words I did. I never bought this ‘have no regrets’ thing. I have regrets and that will always be one of them.”

  “You didn’t mean it. And she knew. Six-year-olds say that stuff all the time.”

  “But if I hadn’t, maybe she would have been more collected and seen the storm come earlier, headed back sooner.”

  “Who can say?”

  “I just did.”

  “You’re double thinking it. My old Grampy told me, ‘no, you don’t shy away, you just look your trouble square and true. Then keep walking your road.’”

  Chiffrey sighed and after a while slowly began to speak again. “When Brand, our ancient hound died, I was ten. Loved that dog, he’d come with me wherever I roamed. Everywhere, never a complaint, nothing but love. One morning, he doesn’t get up. Couldn’t walk. We took him to the vet. Liver failure, nothing he could do. So they put him down.”

  “I was devastated, and I finally went to Grampy. The only thing he said was, ‘every dog has his days and when they’re done, they’re done. The dog dies, but the dog lives on.’ He got me a puppy a few days later, and you know, when I looked into that whelp’s eyes, I saw Brand, I swear. Never forgot that. It’s gotten me through some rough patches.”

  He looked for a moment as if he were gazing into those puppy eyes again. “Anyway,” he said, “the next pass of the satellite, and that ship was nowhere to be seen, but I am certain it was the Captain. If you ever see him again, I’m ready to sign on as deckhand anytime if he has need of one. Seriously.”

  He paused for a moment and traced the grain of the tabletop with his finger. “There’s been nothing on Matthew.”

  “I didn’t expect there would be. Ready for your pie?”

  Not long after Chiffrey’s visit, she was surprised to find herself missing the sea, its smell, its sounds, the movement of water. Even though it was winter, she began to take their small sailboat out into the Strait a few times a week. Sometimes a vision of Valentina, Andrew’s wife, would return, topping the waves in her sloop off the Argentinean coast for the last time. The sadness was still there, like a root crept deep into a crack, impossible to dislodge, but this time she simply left it there in peace.

  On other days, if it wasn’t raining hard, she rode Akaba, their aging stallion, through the many woodland trails. One morning she found a pathway that led her back through her mother’s orchard. She stopped to take a closer look. Small buds were on the branches, life ready to return when prompted by the warmer sun of spring. She came back the next day and the next and soon was also spending time in her mother’s gardens, legendary for their lushness and variety. At first she only strolled through them, but later she began to notice details she had never taken in before. Stones, fitted together on a mound to provide the best conditions for a wildflower, raised beds spaced to maximize the growing potential. She watched a snail for an hour to see where it would go and what it would do. Its shell was a shiny yellowish green and as perfect as anything could be.

  She began to work.

  For the most part, she simply noticed what needed to be done, and as she noticed, started to see what had always been there: the infinitesimal dramas of the natural world. One afternoon as she was weeding, a sun break fell upon some winter flowers and they seemed to smolder with their own luminescence. Though far more subtle and less overwhelming than her experience in the tank with Matthew, that sense of the quintessential in things glimmered again. She rose with it, fell with it, and slipped with joy through its wilder parts.

  Like a stone under falling water, her old cares began to wear away as she gave her hands to the plants and animals immediately around her. Her steps grew lighter on the earth.

  There was a day Penny rode out on Akaba to the one nearby country store for some butter. She wanted to make another pie from the last of the previous summer’s raspberries she had taken from the freezer. When she had walked into the small local store, an old logger she remembered from her childhood was buying bait and ammunition. When she was eleven, he and his crew had clear-cut her favorite gully. It was near her parents’ place, and before it was logged she would wander there and sit with her feet in the stream, watching for the odd fingerling. She had hated the loggers on the day it was all destroyed, the hate burning like a branding iron in her heart.

  Now she stood in the store gazing at this man, and the rain outside seemed to fall in an unfathomable rhythm. An old dark pain deep inside her began to dissolve, like a shadow in sunlight. Her connection with the old logger became like an old dance remembered. Whether he would dance with her or not didn’t really matter. Whether they knew it or not, the circle was big enough to hold them all.

  CHAPTER 67

  It was when she was riding Akaba home that it finally came back to her. Valentina, the last time she had seen her. Valentina, opposite the tiller of her too-small sailboat giving one long look back as she cleared her mooring and headed out to her doom. Valentina, wearing her necklace as she always did. The same string of shells and silver Penny had seen suspended above the ship’s compass, and still there when the ship set sail for other seas in a shimmer of unnamable light. The same “bones of the sea” that should have been lost forever, somehow returned. Then she knew.

  Andrew didn�
��t hang the necklace above the compass. He found it there after their first encounter with the whale! That is how he knew what its purpose would become. A key, a tiller…and it made sense in its own way that the dome would connect together something of Valentina’s to the ship that bore her name. And also to the man closest to them both.

  That night, Penny went to bed early, pleasantly tired from a late session in the garden. The June sun had been warm against her skin all day, and it had grown even warmer as the sun was setting.

  It was a few hours past midnight when she awoke. A breeze was blowing the sea smells up from the Strait into her open window. Despite having only a few hours sleep, she was wide-awake, remembering. The dream had come again, the old one. The man on the pirate ship, she on the shore, standing this time on a small rock outcropping. Something about where she stood waiting had seemed so familiar, and now that she was awake, she knew why. And where to go. And when.

  Tonight…

  She wasted no time, closing the door to her room quietly before padding down the hall to the back stairs. The kitchen was still warm from last night's baking. On her way out she grabbed a roll and pushed a pad of butter deep into its yielding crust. A small bottle of water went into the pocket of her thin jacket and a blanket under her arm.

  Akaba snorted as Penny entered the barn’s gloom and his raven flanks shivered in anticipation. She had learned that he liked to ride in the early hours before the heat of the day, so the job of saddling him went easy. They rode out from the barn into the blush of a full moon, a spectral mist rising from the meadow below like a faint cold fire. The mossy trail that led down to the inlet was illuminated only by moonlight slipping through the trees here and there, but Akaba had his own uncanny ways and never missed a step. She was grateful as much for his company as for the conveyance. They didn’t hurry, but soon they were there.

  The water of the inlet was glassy smooth and so clear that, even at this hour, she could see a Steelhead gliding below the surface. Suddenly the fish shot up and took the life of a fly into his own, their interlude as quickly over as it had begun. The cry of an owl sounded, far away.

  Penny dismounted and let Akaba graze on some of the virgin grass in the clearing, while she went to the rocky outcropping and looked out. It was the same place he had stood when he had watched her swim a year ago. A half hour or so went by, and she finally spread the blanket on the grass and sat down. There was nothing to be seen but a second moon dancing on silvery water like a distant lover.

  She awoke, still sitting, from a half-sleep with a buzzing in her ears, some now forgotten reverie hovering just beyond memory. Her neck was a little sore from hanging down, so she lifted her head slowly. The moon had dipped down below the trees, but the faintest glint of daybreak was just hitting the tops of the tallest of them. Several geese flew over the Strait, outlined in chevron flight against the dawn. A gentle lapping sound came from the water, and she stood up.

  Then, without a ripple, a dark head appeared out in the placid waters of the inlet.

  He looked at her, and his large eyes, though nearly black, held the hint of a familiar golden light. The breeze died down to nothing, and silence held the few sounds like jewels on black velvet. A voice began to sing inside her, flowing and ebbing, sounds turning to color and feeling and finally one word.

  You…

  He swam closer, turned and circled, swam closer again until he was in front of the rock. She stepped back. He paused for an instant then leapt out of the water’s grasp to stand gleaming naked before her in quiet confidence. All his hair had grown back, and he wore a full beard on a slightly leaner face that contrasted with his now more muscular body. But this she barely noticed, for in his dark eyes, along with tiny shimmers of gold, she saw herself encompassed by his love, as clear and warm as the sun that was now rising. She reached out and Matthew’s hand came to hers. They looked at each other but remained silent, neither moving as time slowed, then seemed to come to a standstill. Tears rolled down his face, but he smiled. Her eyes watered up, and she cried softly, holding nothing back.

  His mouth opened, then closed for a moment as if he was trying to remember how to speak. “Out there,” he finally said, “a single day was like an eternity. Everything that ever happened, all the pain and happiness, fell away from me like sand through a child’s fingers. I was gone forever. And then you were…with me, and I remembered. You brought me here.”

  Akaba whinnied and stomped his hooves, as if in delight at recognizing an old friend.

  “Much is before us,” Matthew said.

  “And much will be asked of us,” she answered, somehow knowing this to be true without a single detail clear.

  He looked toward the trail. “Your mother and father. They need to know I’m all right.”

  “They’re away. We’ll go up in a while and find a safe means to let them know.”

  Then, remembering Chiffrey’s stories of high-resolution reconnaissance satellites, she glanced up through an opening in the leaves that shimmered in the breeze.

  “We’re sheltered,” he said as if guessing her thoughts. “I can tell things like this now.” He glanced down. “Even so, I’d better find some clothes.”

  “There’s a blanket here,” she said. Then, with a smile, “But not just yet.”

  A returning breeze set the leaves of the aspens to whispering their ancient secrets. On the moss knoll below, Matthew and Penelope reclined in each other’s arms and drifted far from the sea we know to where the tides of time and space hold no sway. There they drifted through colors that can never be named and sounds that can never be sung until the deep thrum of an engine called them back. Wrapped in the blanket, they stood up and gazed out across the water in time to see the Valentina gliding like a phantom out of the morning mist.

  The End

  Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

  And the hunter home from the hill.

  — Robert Louis Stevenson

  ###

  I hope you enjoyed the book. If you did please consider leaving a review, even a short one at your favorite retailer or site.

  Appreciated!

  Frank M Sheldon

  About the author

  I grew up in New England, lived in the UK for about a year, then back to New England a while, then back to the UK for four years, then lived in West Virginia and Virginia for more years (with some of them as part of an intentional community) followed by a move to Berlin with my wife, where we also lived on and off in an old farmhouse in the former DDR, there to help run courses in Guitar Craft. Four years later, we moved to Seattle where we reside still. In between and all around, much happened, and this book comes out of that. As well as writing, I work with my wife, Ingrid Pape-Sheldon, on her photo business in Seattle and occasionally still with Guitar Circles, which evolved from Guitar Craft, a placeless space that became for many years as much a home as I might ever have. I have a cool daughter on the East Coast who comes to visit now and then. Boots, our cat, remains here to keep an eye on us. Her book, THE EMPTY BOWL & OTHER TRAGEDIES, is all but written in her own mind.

  And, yes, more stories to come….

  Friend this novel on Facebook:

  http://www.facebook.com/FarFromTheSeaWeKnow

  My site:

  http://www.frankmsheldon.com

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to thank the following people:

  My daughter Katherine, who gave me my first useful criticism and some of my last as well. My wife Ingrid, for her patience and encouragement in seeing me through my first novel. My sister Cynthia, and my brother Mark, who both encouraged me in this project. My sister Janet and her husband Fred for inspiration and, lately, their son Richard for giving me another kick to get this in print. My father Alfred, who took me early in my life on trips to far off places. My mother Caroline, who read to me at bedtime, and made the stories come alive for me.

  Teachers and story tellers: Miss Taylor. Bill Caulder. Mrs. Crane. Mr. Ives. Phil Per
ry. Dr. Wright. Bill Calder. John Hoy. Michael March. Alan Crane. Normy Graves. James Kaplan. Geoffrey Richon. Ron Sutton-Jones. Mick Sutton. Edwin & Ginny. Yogesh. J. & H. Bortoft. Hugh Elliot. JGB.

  David and Nonny for giving me the opportunity to find out that I had something to write. Robert Sanders, Jan Jarvis, Elisabeth Perrin, and Jaxie Binder for early advice. Tim Stone for well appreciated encouragement during our Berlin period. Curt Golden for well appreciated encouragement since living in Seattle. Christina Florkowski for patience. Franis Engel for a needed kick. Sandra Prow for support and excellence in pie. SBC for shouldering a load lightly. Carolina Leguizamon. The Seattle Guitar Circle. Tony Geballe. All the Valentinas. MG. Fernando Kabusaki and his mother, who gave me a place to stay in Rosario. You can visit there too in chapter 61.

  Early readers and supporters, Pat Myren, Brock Pytel, Peter Kardas, Steve Ball, Victor McSurely, John O’Connor, Bill & Donna Van Buren, Bob Williams, Carola Tocornal, Dean Jensen, Jane Pietkivitch, Peter Kardas, Rachel Altman, Ron Sutton-Jones, Sally Asthana, Stephen Golovin, Tobin Buttram, Tom Redmond, Janette Rosebrook, Vivien Engelberg, Martin Bradburn, Anne Knapton and Richard Pickwick. Robert.