by Brian Hodge
Jeremy curled tighter. He wanted to know what was being said, to put it into perspective before he sat up. It was all a mistake, obviously. He shouldn’t be there. Not like this, not small and vulnerable, shivering in a chair shrouded in shadow, but alone and brooding in his father’s room. It would all fade if he sat up. He would be passed out across that bed, nothing on the wall behind him at all. Nothing but a mirror to stare into that would stare back and mock his meaningless life – that would show him the younger face of the father he’d lost.
“She’s hung there nearly ten years,” a deep, guttural voice cut through Jeremy’s thoughts. “Hung her there myself. The nail is a square one; drew it by hand from the very wood of that ship.”
There were murmurs, but no words, in reply, and the voice continued until an image twisted into shape in Jeremy’s mind. It was Terry, but not exactly Terry. It was an aged, too-squat Terry with a beard gone half-grey down the center and gnarled, liver-spotted hands. It was a Terry two generations back, when the barber shop had been so much more than a barber shop, and the back room had been sacred.
“She’d ridden the waves so long it took a good hour’s work just to wipe away the salt scum that held her to the prow. She was bolted down, of course, but those bolts had long since surrendered to salt and wind. They crumbled like dust when I tried to pry them loose. For all that, it was no easy task. That ship clung to her like a lover, green mossy slime stretching like some god-forsaken glue. Two more days and she’d have dined with Davey Jones himself. The plan was to scuttle her over the far side of the reef, where her bones could blend with the coral and not be a hazard.”
“Seems a shame,” a softer voice replied, floating out from the far corner of the room. “I mean, that ship was a beauty. Shame to see her go down.”
The silence that followed grew heavy, and despite the ludicrous notion of cowering in a chair much too big to be real, Jeremy felt himself shiver as the weight of it settled over the room. Someone coughed, and a glass hit the table with a heavy clunk.
“Maybe you should have let her go, too.” The words echoed. Jeremy recognized his father’s voice. For some reason this was more comforting than disturbing in that moment.
There was a quick, grating sound as a chair pushed away from the table. Heavy footsteps followed, and then Terry Brown’s grandfather’s rough voice continued, as though no other words had been spoken.
“I couldn’t bear to see her go. Not that way. Not after all I knew. She didn’t belong to the sea, not then, not ever, though the barnacles and the weather had done their best to disguise her as one of their own.” He paused again, and then added more softly. “I couldn’t send her back to him. Not that.”
“Tell us,” the soft voice Jeremy didn’t recognize cut in. “Tell us again.”
Jeremy dared to uncoil his small frame slightly, peeking just over the arm of the old leather chair. He saw a tall, broad-shouldered man with his back to the table, one hand gently caressing the cheek of the figurehead on the wall. The woman’s eyes returned that gaze with more emotion than was possible, and Jeremy ducked back into the tentative safety of the chair.
“They said she was beautiful,” the elder Brown’s voice rose, a practiced story-teller practicing his art, “so beautiful that men would travel miles just for the chance to see her face, or hear her voice. They say she had the beauty that starts wars, or ends a dynasty. They say … she was loved …”
Jeremy felt the world shift again and he started from the leather seat. His balance failed, and he teetered to the side, clutching at the arm of the chair. It wasn’t there. He grabbed an armful of air and toppled, crying out softly and striking the floor hard. His senses reeled, and he felt the soft brush of something on his cheek. The acrid scent of mothballs filled his nostrils and he coughed violently, rolling to his back.
The silence of his parent’s room surrounded him. The ceiling, lowered tiles he remembered his father laying in place, one at a time on the rickety, dangling framework that held them suspended over the room, shimmered.
“Makes the room look longer and wider.”
Jeremy heard his father’s voice clearly. As he stared at the ceiling, the room in the back of the barber shop faded slowly from his mind. He could still hear the words as clearly as the day they'd first been spoken. He remembered the skeptical frown in his mother’s eyes, and the silent nod. He remembered thinking that the tiles did nothing but make the room short, and squat. He remembered saying nothing.
Rising slowly, he reached to the bed for support and levered himself to his feet. The wall was bare. Nothing. Not even a photograph, or a gilt-framed mirror to fill the space. The mirror he might have understood, because then the face he’d touched could have been his own.
On the night stand beside the bed, a framed photograph of his parents watched him.
“Not this time, old man,” Jeremy whispered.
He grabbed the pillows from the head of the bed and yanked free the down comforter, heading for the hall. Moments later, without a backward glance, he slipped through the doorway into his old room. He didn’t flip on the light. He sprawled out over the bed and wrapped himself in the comforter, sliding his head between two down pillows and closing his eyes, drifting off to sleep before the dreams could descend and trap him in that netherworld between rest and reality.
Autumn in Cedar Falls was a quiet time. Things were ending, and beginning, school in session and the football season in full swing. Churches were gearing up for the final bake sale before Thanksgiving, and the road crews were oiling and winterizing their equipment for the annual war with the weather. Despite the comfortable familiarity of it all, Jeremy couldn't shake the cold knot of ice free from his chest.
He still heard his father's voice, and every time he closed his eyes, the scents of leather and tobacco permeated his world. He drove straight through the center of town, skipping the market and passing the "General Store," still in operation despite the competition of the new Super Walmart down by the highway. There was only one place he was likely to get his answers.
He parked right out front of the barber shop, waiting until the dust had settled before he stepped out and closed the door behind himself. There was no light inside, but he knew Terry was open. The barber shop had always been open – Jeremy couldn't remember a time when it had not been. Of course, most of those memories were of visits with his father, and there was no clarity of time, or space. Jeremy had been more of an accessory than a companion, brought along because it was what father's in Cedar Falls did.
Now there was no father, and the town was slowly dying around the edges. So little remained of what had seemed so huge and imposing those many years in the past that the town hung against the sky like a tattered and torn postcard. Not many people were up and about on a Saturday morning, at least not in town. There were a couple of kids playing in the park out front of the Post Office, and just before Jeremy reached the barber shop door, a police cruiser rolled slowly past behind him, moving on to other pockets of inactivity en-route to the diner by Route 12.
Jeremy wondered fleetingly why he hadn't noticed the general decline the day before. Everything had seemed so – quaint. So rural and down-home comfortable. Now it looked like a too-old prop in a bad horror movie. The buildings leaned, ready to fall over backward at the slightest provocation, nothing more than propped up plywood silhouettes.
The barber shop was even darker than it had been before, and though the door was ajar, there was no sign that Terry was open for business. There was no activity at all, in fact. Dust covered the chairs and the walls were dingy. Jeremy released the door and it swung to with a squeal of old metal in need of oil. The only illumination came through the slats of the blinds to his rear, and from beneath the crack of the door to the back. From there a soft, yellowish light trickled, slipping to puddle just beyond the base of the door, which was closed.
"Terry?" Jeremy didn't call out too loudly. Something held him back. There was no answer.
&nbs
p; He called out again, a bit more insistently, and stepped closer to the door in back. “Terry? Are you there?"
Nothing again, and moments later he stood, ear to the wooden frame of the door, trying to press his eye to the crack that was releasing the light. The sound of feet shuffling reached him, and the soft murmur of voices.
Hesitantly, Jeremy reached out and rapped on the door. At first he thought no one had heard him, and he was hovering between the desire to knock louder, pounding until they let him in and told him what the hell was going on when the door swung wide. The floor beneath him lurched sickeningly, tumbling him forward, and Jeremy reached out with a cry drowned quickly in the roar of …
Waves. Crashing, rolling high above and tumbling toward him, foam-tipped and peppering face and eyes with hard, stinging salt-slaps of spray. His stumble brought him up abruptly against a wooden rail, and he clutched the slimy surface tightly as his chest slammed into the solid wood and his knees threatened to buckle from the impact.
The water hit then, and everything else disappeared. Jeremy pressed tightly to the wood, clutching with his hands and gripping with his knees, fighting the crushing weight of the cold, relentless seawater as it pounded against him, and then receded with a sickening, sucking sound. It rushed over the side and the world tilted backward as quickly as it had leaned forward. Closing his eyes, Jeremy clung more tightly to the rail, fingers slipping and groping along the wet-slick wood for purchase and feet threatening to slip off behind him and down.
For an eternity of deafening sound and flashing lightning, he hung nearly perpendicular to the sea, then he rushed back the other way, compressed tightly to the wooden rail and his breath left him. Voices cried out, nearly lost in the gale, and Jeremy's mind swam with the words, trying to order them so they made sense, trying to find the courage to release the rail, turn, and step back through the door and into the barber shop – the world.
The same world that chose that moment to lurch again, not so violently this time, and Jeremy felt the ship turning beneath him – felt the prow coming about, just in time, slicing the next of the monstrous waves that had threatened moments before to wash him from the deck into a sea of insanity. The voices grew clearer, and Jeremy risked releasing the rail with one hand to brush the soaked hair from his eyes.
It was too dark to make out anything more than the length of his arm from his face, but the lightning flashes gave a strobed pseudo-light just visible through the stinging salt. Jeremy saw the prow of the ship, dropping down with a stomach-stealing lurch to shimmy at the base of a huge swelling wave, then rise so high that only the sky and the angry face of the storm, creased in deep green, blue-black and silver by the searing crackles of lightning, filled his vision. There was a shape, solid and unmoving, like a body leading the ship through the storm. A woman. Droplets of water washed back and off, giving the illusion of silver hair in each lightning burst.
From behind, strong fingers gripped suddenly beneath Jeremy's arms, and he was jerked from the rail and hauled up and back. The ship was no steadier than before, but the danger of slipping side to side had passed, and moments later Jeremy crashed to the wall of what must have been the ship's cabin.
“Get inside!” The words screamed through his eardrums, blocking out the storm, just for an instant, and Jeremy turned, wild-eyed. Terry stood there – not Terry – taller with similar features. The man’s hair waved wildly about his head and his eyes smoldered with barely controlled anger – and strength.
“Get below, damn you!” The man repeated, cuffing Jeremy on the side of the head. “I’ve not enough men to make it without you.”
Other hands groped from the shadowed doorway of the cabin and Jeremy was jerked inside, just as another wave crashed across the deck and threatened to drag him back to the railing, or further. As he tumbled backward into the shadows, Jeremy caught a last lightning flash. The woman’s figure stared out over the waves stoically.
His foot caught on the top stair, and he tumbled, ignoring the loud cursing of whomever it was that had dragged him to safety. He felt the contact as the two of them slammed into the wall, then continued back and down, banging one knee painfully and twisting mid-air to try and get his hands beneath him. There was nothing. Nothing but shadow, and as he passed to darkness, he felt damp wood as his hands struck first, chin following in a jarring tangle of tar-soaked hemp and salt-soaked planks. The darkness that followed was sudden, and complete.
Jeremy returned to consciousness amid the scents of leather and tobacco. His head pounded painfully, and his eyes refused to focus. The room was adrift in pipe smoke, pungent and overpowering. He coughed, hand rising to cover his mouth and body convulsing until he bent nearly double from the effort to draw clean air into his lungs. His eyes stung, and he could barely focus through the pain, so he closed them tightly.
“Quite a tumble.”
The words hung in the air, making no sense coming from the direction and voice that they did. Jeremy brushed his fingers gingerly over the growing knot on his head and forced his eyes open once more.
He was in the back room of the barber shop. The old refrigerator hummed too-loudly against the wall. Terry sat across the table from him, an open beer resting between cupped palms.
“I was wrong,” Terry went on. “Been here by myself so long, I’d started to think things would come full-circle and end. Seemed right. Now I see she’s been callin’ you back all along.”
“She?” Jeremy coughed the word out, making it a question.
Terry just watched him, raising his beer and taking a long drink.
“You know who I mean,” he said at last. “Now I have a story - the story. You just sit there and try to concentrate.”
Terry rose slowly, moving to the refrigerator and drawing forth a second cold beer, which he carried across the room and placed in front of Jeremy on the table. The barber untwisted the cap with a quick jerk of his wrist and left the bottle to stand, tiny wisps of steam rising from the neck to remind Jeremy of the ship – the waves. The throbbing in his head subsided to a dull ache, and he rose, moving the leather chair he was leaning back in closer to the table and grabbing the beer tightly. He raised the cold glass to press against his temple for a moment, then took a drink and met Terry’s gaze.
“Tell me.”
“It started in Scotland,” Terry began slowly. His eyes, and his voice, took on a distance and a depth they’d not seemed to possess previously. “None of our fathers were even gleams in their own father’s eyes at the time, but one thing was the same. The ocean. Even then, when women waited by the fires and wars were fought hand to hand, enemies staring one another in the eye and defying death, she called to us. There was one who answered.
“Angus was his name, and he took to the sea so young they say he was sailing from near the day he was born. The son of a son of a sea captain, bred to the ocean - the far shore. Born with the burning need to see what lay beyond the next wave. Angus Griswold belonged to the sea.
“Until he met her,” Terry stopped, nodding toward the door, and the barber shop beyond – the woman hanging on the wall – the world that seemed so distant Jeremy could scarcely grant it credence.
“She was the daughter of a merchant he met in his travels. Angus wasn’t one to settle in one place, but the day he met her, he found that an anchor had been cast that would not dislodge. She was beautiful. Beyond anything he’d seen, rivaling even the blue of the deepest lagoons and the scent of the islands after a storm, she drew him. At night, on the deck of his ship, he would think of her, writing letters long into the night, only to crumple them and toss them aside in anger, drowning his imagination in rum and dark thoughts, until even his men began to talk.
“He returned to Scotland, soon after, and erected a keep overlooking the waves, tall and strong and built of stone dragged from the very edge of the sea. All that time, he kept her face in his heart. He wrote more letters, and eventually, a few of them weren’t crumpled. He sent the first, then the second, and w
hen she replied to his third, he wrote again, until at last he found himself before her father, a tall, thin man with piercing eyes. You’ve seen those eyes, mirrored in the countenance of his daughter.
“They were wed, soon after, and settled into that keep. That prison.”
“Prison?” Jeremy asked, finally finding the courage and strength to take the beer in a shaky hand and draw deep. “You said it was a keep.”
“It was that,” Terry said softly. “It kept him from his other love – his oldest love. It kept him from the sea while holding it out before him like a carrot dangled before an ass. She loved him, Jeremy. She loved him with all her heart, mind – soul. She loved him, and in the end, it wasn’t enough.
“Ten years to the day after he brought her home, Angus bought a boat. He told her it would be for short trips - jaunts up the coast and back, but she knew. In his eyes, the waves danced, and the sun set over shores with unknown lines.
“He sailed within the year.”
“Sailors have always sailed away,” Jeremy said, lifting his eyes to meet the barber’s. “They come home.”
“Not Angus,” Terry shook his head and sipped his beer. “Not that time.
“He was gone a year before she began to really worry, sending letters home to her father, who was less than sympathetic. He’d received her dowry, and she was aging – still beautiful, but not of marrying age, and still married, in any case, to Angus. The year stretched into another, and another - ten years, Jeremy. She lived alone in that keep for ten years, spending the money Angus had amassed in a life of sailing and trade, and pining for the one thing that had drawn her to the ocean’s side. The one thing she couldn’t have.
“Every night she watched at the balcony outside her room until the sun set and the moon rose high above the waves. Every night she prayed. Some say, near the end, when the loneliness had started to make her crazy, that she prayed to others than the God we know. There were books found in her towers, books none could place, or translate – some written by hand, others printed in far away lands. Angus must have brought them home, but it was obvious that his lover was the one to find their use.
