I could not bring myself to speak my heart.
I would be a father. I would help her bring a son into the world.
My son was a blessing.
At two he toddled about, his head barely higher than the table, eyes that saw spoons and jars of salt, the knees and ankles of our guests when he hid. His speech was slow to come. When it came, he did not speak like other boys.
I remember Marina gave him a set of toy soldiers. They were made of lead, heavy things, and clumsily crafted. The paint flaked off to expose the dull sheen of metal beneath. But the boy loved them.
One day I saw that Stefanos had separated out a single soldier. Not the poorest of the lot, by any stretch, but certainly no favorite. The figure—head tilted to the ground, helmet askew, caught in some badly rendered mimicry of motion—held a red rifle by the barrel as if he intended to use it as a club. The rest of the soldiers circled him at a distance, wary perhaps, or merely watching the shadow show in amusement.
“A firing squad?” I asked him playfully.
“No, Babbas.”
“Then what?”
Stefanos shook his head. “The other soldiers do not like him.”
“Why do they not like him, Stefanos?”
“God lives in this one,” he said.
Marina did not like this very much. She shooed him from the house and placed the soldiers all in a box. Except the lone soldier in the center.
“Throw this in the sea,” she begged me. One delicate hand clutched the lead soldier, the other, white knuckled, squeezed the folds of her skirt. My wife asked little enough of me, and I could see the fear in her eyes, the rolling white edges of them, and so I did as she asked.
Stefanos never spoke of his missing soldier, but sometimes he would wear a strange look on his face: as if he had breathed all the silence in the room into his chest and held it there, his lungs a perfect prison. He became a quiet boy, but always obedient. I loved him.
I did not speak to Marina further concerning the little toy she had brought for Stefanos. I could not. I could not tell her about the way the metal seemed to glow like a coal in my hand when I touched it. Not hot, exactly. But something. The way I hated the feel of it in my hand. That raised red rifle pressing into the mound beneath my thumb. It was as if I had touched something unclean. It would have only frightened her further to hear these things. And, besides, Stefanos soon outgrew such toys. He did not dwell long in childhood.
Even now I look at Stefanos in admiration. At twenty, he is good at his work. Far better than I ever was. But I worry for his happiness. I worry he is not kind enough to the women who sometimes smile at him, that he will never find a wife and have a child of his own. There is too much quiet in him, too much solemnity. When I look at him I see so little of myself there, except, perhaps, in the shape of his jaw, the curve of his forehead. But perhaps he keeps much of himself hidden from me. Perhaps all sons do, as I hid myself from my father.
And he always obeys me. If I tell him to handle the boat in a certain fashion or to set it on a particular angle to the wind, he will always do so. He never speaks against me even if, privately, he may disagree. If anything, there might only be the briefest pause—barely a pause at all!—before he says, “Yes, Babbas.”
I believe he respects me. I think that obedience comes from respect, does it not? But still I wonder if it would have been easier if we argued. If he had a streak of insolence in him. As it is, I have begun to listen for the pauses. To hate the feel of his eyes on me a moment too long before they flinch away.
Sometimes I change course. Sometimes I ask myself, “Kostas, have you checked the lines? Are you certain of the waters?”
Sometimes I stare at my son. “Stefanos knows something,” I say to myself. “What does he know?”
More than once these questions have averted disaster, but would it not have been easier if he had simply told me straight off? Is he afraid of me? I have never once given him cause to be afraid. To doubt my affection. Have I? I have never laid a hand upon him. I have never cut a grinning red mouth into his hand. I have never spoken of my doubts.
This is the great fear of fatherhood. To know that love is a chancy thing. It has its tides, it has its seasons, and it can shatter a man’s luck. I know the shape of the waves, the sound they make as they grind against the hull, as they drag pebbles on the beach. I know the constellations. I know the pattern of the clouds. But even now I do not know my own son.
My father—Old Babbas now—had always been a strong man, his muscles thick and corded underneath his loosening, wrinkled skin. The other sailors respected him. He had built the caïque himself, fitted the planks. Two wars he had fought in, and lived. No bullet found him. He laughed at storms. But the years were a burden upon him.
Now he could work the winch of the windlass. He could haul in the nets. Now he could not. His legs failed him. He gasped for breath. Then he died.
After his death it fell to me to tend to his effects. Stefanos and I went to the little house he had lived in, but there was little of value. Two copper pots, one dented and mended, the other new. Chipped crockery. A jug with a split lip. I recognized the wool sweater that hung on the chair. It stilled smelled of my father, the peculiar sweet smell of his sweat. I folded it gently.
“You should keep that,” Stefanos said.
“The hem is unraveling.”
“Mama can mend it,” he told me. He rested a hand lightly on my shoulder, but I turned away, wiped at my eyes with the back of my hand. The unwashed salt of the sea stung.
His bed, when we found it, was unmade. The sheets were dirty and stank.
“Babbas,” said Stefanos.
“We should burn these. They will be no good to anyone.”
In the bedroom I found the old nook I had pillaged so often as a child. There it was. The little statue. I had not known I was looking for it, but having laid eyes on its familiar shape, my blood long since flaked away from the belly, the jagged, teething line of the arm, I felt a keen sort of tension go out of me like the slacking of a rope.
I picked it up slowly. Stefanos watched me. I could feel his eyes tracking my movements.
The statue was much how I remembered it. Ugly. Misshapen. Now I wanted to smash it to pieces. Now I wanted to clutch it to my breast.
“Babbas,” said Stefanos.
Truthfully, I had forgotten he was there. But he was. I could see the shape of his shoulder in the dull light. His smoothly muscled arms. Even the black wiry hairs stood up, pricked to attention.
“That is mine. Old Babbas gave it to me.”
“You are mistaken,” I scoffed. The feel of the stone was cool in my hand. The weight was exactly the same. It should have felt lighter. My hands had been a boy’s hands when I last held it. Or perhaps I had diminished. Perhaps I had lived through the better part of my life already.
“No, Babbas. It was for me to have. He told me so.”
“Listen, boy,” I said. “I have loved this statue since I was a boy.”
“He said you broke it.”
“I—” My tongue stumbled.
“You must give it to me,” Stefanos said. His eyes were calm. Sad even. “He did not want you to have it.”
He was normally such an obedient son! I turned away. Tried to make a jest of it.
“Surely you would not turn against me now,” I teased. “You would not risk my love for such a little thing?”
“No, Babbas.” It was like his body had been set ablaze. There was a heat to him. A furnace nestled inside. His teeth were set so that he smiled differently in the half-light. His lips twitched as if a ghost tugged at them. I shivered though the room was stiflingly hot now.
Still he was so quiet! My silent son! His tongue was a dead snake, why did it never stir? Except now. Except in disobedience. Could he not see the old man had been addled? Did he not know that a father’s possessions were the fair due of the son? Ungrateful! Intolerable! Had that man not been my father? Had I not loved him as best I could, forgiven his ab
andonment, given him a grandson, comfort in his old age?
“It is mine.” I howled the words at him. I had kept my own silences too long. He would hear me now. He must hear me. “It is my right!”
“No, Babbas,” he said. “Please. Set it away.”
I did not want to listen. I clenched my fist, made a great club of it. My nails pressed into the sick white scar my own father had given me. I wondered where he had left the knife. I thought of all the sons who had been left on hillsides for animals. The sons who had been torn apart by wolves. It was only as I raised my hand into the air—ready to knock his insolent teeth out!—that I was aware I had made any movement at all.
Stefanos, for his part, was still.
It was as if we were on the boat again. He did not speak, but there was the slightest pause in his breathing. That tiny silence I had learned to recognize. And then I knew—he would let me strike him. He was younger. His arms were tireless, his joints did not stiffen, did not slow. He was more than my match. But he would let me strike him.
There was only the pause. Only the waiting.
I have never felt such shame. It came sickening and sudden. What was this thing that had come between us?
I sat down heavily on the bed, appalled.
I did not want him to touch me, but he did. He rested a hand easily on my shoulder. A light touch, but strong.
“Let me tell you,” Stefanos said, “ how this statue came to him.”
“How do you know this story?”
“He told me.”
“He never told me.”
“I shall tell you.”
These were his words:
Once there was a time when Old Babbas had been a young man, twenty perhaps. The war had just claimed the first of his brothers. The family had little to eat. So Old Babbas took out the boat though the wind was high and it was not a good time to sail. Many had warned him against this, but he was young, full of anger and grief, and perhaps he wished the waves to claim him. I do not know. He did not tell me. Only that a storm overtook him and smashed his boat against the shore of the sacred island, Delos, which was once called the invisible island when the gods kept it beneath the waters.
He had never set foot on the shore because of the old law that no man should be born or should die there. But the storm broke him upon the beach and he found himself pierced badly by a spar. He who knew his own strength best could feel it pour out of him in a bright pool on the beach. He lay on the sand amongst the fish and the broken shells and the things that had crawled out of the ocean during the storm, and he knew he must not die. And so he prayed to the dark god of the ocean—not as my mother or my grandmother would have it—but to the one who watches us when we take to the waves, the one who blesses us with fish and curses us with salt.
You have seen the island from a distance. You have seen the temples there, the ruined pillars of marble. How they catch the sun and send off such a dizzying light. Perhaps Old Babbas found himself amongst one such temple. In any case, he discovered there this little statue, and the statue drank his tears and the statue drank his prayers and the statue drank his blood. And though the night was long and cold, and the storm was fierce, he did not die as he supposed. When daylight touched the marble and sent it blazing, his brothers found him.
Old Babbas had believed himself lucky, but, of course, this was not so: the war took his brothers one by one by one, and it took their sons and it took their daughters. Only you were spared. You alone. And now me. Of course, me.
Old Babbas never knew much of the statue. He called it his luck. He called it his curse. Perhaps it is Poseidon, as he believed. But perhaps it was not. Perhaps there is another god who lives within the ocean. Waiting.
There are things in the ocean, Babbas, that you cannot imagine. I have seen them. And this statue? All your life you have sought after the shadow of the thing instead of the thing itself. A rock is not a god, even if it is in the shape of one. You are clutching at moonlight on the water as if it were the water and not the light itself that was beautiful.
But I have seen more than moonlight. I have seen the shape of dark things in the night. You have given your blood to the rock, yes, but there is something of it lodged in me, like a fishhook, and I will not heal from it. Do you not see that? Do you not understand?
This, this is mine. My blessing and my curse. You will die one day. I have seen your death, Babbas, as I saw the death of Old Babbas before you. But I have not seen my own death, do you understand? For me there is something else and I do not know what it is, but I cannot turn away from it.
There are things you do not understand. The old man of the ocean slumbers beneath his blanket of salt but he shall not stay silent forever.
And I belong to him. This is what Old Babbas told me. You were spared. But one of us must go.
I cannot say if I believed what Stefanos told me. All I can say is that when he finished his tale, his hands were shaking, and I clutched at him as I had when he was a small child. In that moment, whatever else he was, I saw him as very young. And very afraid.
For the long years of my life there has always been a grief in me. It has a weight and it has a shape that I recognize. And perhaps all sons carry it. Perhaps all fathers carry it. He does not want this thing. He does not want it as I wanted it, my fingers always itching to claim it as my own. But something has hooked within him. He struggles like a fish on the line but it will not let him free.
I hold Stefanos in my arms—and he is burning, he is burning—and there is an awfulness, an uncleanness to him. Perhaps I ought to have strangled him at birth. Left him in the wilderness. But when I close my eyes I am struck by the sense that we two are aboard a very small caïque, and I know the ocean is beneath me, monstrous deep and very very wide, the waves rocking us both. Now light, now heavy, now joyful, now terribly sad.
It is every father’s dream that his son should outlive him. No father wishes to see the death of his offspring.
And yet. And yet. I do not know my son. I do not know what shall come from him.
And so I hold him. And I pray Stefanos will be a good man. I pray he will care for his mother.
I pray he will have sons of his own in time, and that he will take some measure of comfort from them—if such a thing is allowed to him.
I pray—it is a failing on my part, perhaps, the curse of too-weak love that I cannot take this from him—but I pray that when I am dead, he will bury my bones far from the sea, where the earth makes a knuckle to beat back the waves.
Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men.
“The Call of Cthulhu” . H. P. Lovecraft
THE DOOM THAT CAME TO DEVIL REEF
Don Webb
Among Lovecraft’s papers at Brown University was a large manila envelope containing a school exercise notebook and a newspaper clipping. The notebook’s owner, Miss Julia Phillips, had been mistakenly identified as a cousin of American horror writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937). Over four-fifths of the pen and pencil entries are rather commonplace detailing Miss Phillips’ life as a seamstress in the Providence of the 1920s, her growing depression, and her commitment to Butler Hospital. As both of Lovecraft’s parents had ended their years in the selfsame institution, Julia had been perceived as another branch of a less than mentally healthy tree. It wasn’t until Lovecraft’s biographer S. T. Joshi read the volume that it was seen as anything other than a rather dreary memento. It is in the last few pages of the book wherein Julia’s dreams or waking fancies take an amazingly cosmic tone that the book became of interest to Lovecraftian scholars. The relationship of Julia and Howard is unknown. Lovecraft had little interest in psychiatry, rather than his occasional denunciation of Freud in his letters. No one has been able to discover how Lovecraft came into possession of the book.
What is clear is that Julia’s fantasies became Lovecraft’s inspiration for
his 1931 novella “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” Lovecraft’s notes in the volume are slight, but he occasionally erased Julia’s words altogether and wrote in his fictional equivalents. For example, Julia records that she is writing about the real world Massachusetts town of Newburyport where Julia had spent her childhood. Lovecraft erased all but one instance of “Newburyport” and wrote in “Innsmouth.” Likewise, certain demons or gods of Julia’s delusions have been replaced with Cthulhu, Dagon, and Mother Hydra. It is tempting to speculate that Lovecraft had considered the diary as a sort of objet trouvé or “ready-made” to continue the mythic patterns he began in earlier work, especially “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926). Perhaps Julia’s rather simple style, reflecting her fifth-grade education, was too limiting for Lovecraft, or perhaps the whole notion struck him as artistically dishonest. Given Lovecraft’s penchant for recording even the smallest details of his moods and life in his letters it seems remarkable that Julia’s diary was never mentioned.
Inevitably that class of literalist thinker that assumes all of Lovecraft’s stories are some sort of mystic channelings, have claimed the diary of Julia Phillips is the work of a kindred soul—likewise expressing the “mysteries of the Aeon.” Perhaps Lovecraft himself, who had played with the artistic notion of art and dream coming from some sort of Otherness, was attracted to and then repulsed by the contents of this diary for that seeming. Again, unless further documentation comes to light we shall never know.
Here is what we do know about Julia Phillips. She was the third of six children to be born to Rodger Allen and Susan Williams Phillips. Born in 1891, she was a year younger than Lovecraft. Her father was a green grocer and her mother supplemented the family’s income with sewing, a skill young Julia excelled at. Her sickly youth kept her a homebody while her two brothers joined the merchant marine and her three better-adjusted (and apparently better-looking) sisters found husbands. When her parents died she went to live with her eldest sister, Velma, and alternated between manic periods of religiosity and depressed periods of terrible lethargy. At first she was the merely eccentric aunt, whose financial contribution was greatly valued. As time wore on, she became worrisome to her sister and brother-in-law. In 1924 Julia tried to kill herself with rat poison after months of the darkest depression. The family had her committed to Butler. She remained in Butler until 1927. For the majority of her stay she was a model patient. She repaired the garments of other patients, took part in the sing-alongs, and greeted her family in a sane and cheery tone during their infrequent visits. The entries prior to her commitment were made in pen, but the hospital only allowed a No. 1 pencil during Julia’s stay.
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