Not a soul watched as the coffin was lowered into the ground. A father dying was no longer of interest to the islanders. Instead, all eyes were on the departed’s son, who stood over the hole an arm’s length from his mother. Grief was far more compelling than the dead, and a child’s grief, as they began to grasp the despair the world had in store for them, even more so. This was the true glee and the fulfillment of the hidden purpose of funerals. Tears streamed down the boy’s face and as the crowd looked on, the same thought occurred to them all. The boy was beautiful. His father would have told Sebastian he was too old to cry, but his father was dead, so Sebastian cried. Under an assembly of clouds, morning dew rising like spirits over the hill, he looked like a portrait of grief distilled to its purest form. His cheeks were red and hot as tears came down in even streams, his eyes and face swollen, but all would have agreed it only added to his beauty. The bent forms of darker trees scraped against the sky, encroaching on the cemetery as the priest waved his hands in careful gesture, as if spelling out some arcane language in the air. Sebastian looked to his mother, so practiced in despair, but she could be of no comfort to the boy.
Sebastian’s mother took a handful of dirt in a clenched fist and tossed it gently atop the coffin, now resting at the bottom of the grave. She looked at her young son, confused and helpless, now peering over the hole as if to be certain his father was gone. The moment called for comfort, a loving touch, a word; the thought never occurred to her. Not since Sebastian was a baby had she held him, and even then, she only did so out of some animal compulsion. Never had she put a hand on his shoulder to guide him along, nor had she ever grazed his cheek or stroked his hair. She shrunk away from his beauty as if it would strike her down where she stood. She regarded Sebastian as a cruel slight against her from the outer world and nothing more.
She had been born and raised on the island; lacking bitterness and full of fear, she was kind and thoughtful, but those were not qualities the island rewarded. Her father died when she was younger than her son was now, waiting (in one last act of cruelty) until she could just hold memories of him. Her own mother never recovered from the loss. She saw herself in her daughter, so she, in an act of self-flagellation and a notion to take up the solemn duties of a man, would bend her daughter over the kitchen table and beat the girl until her wrist hurt. As soon as Sebastian’s mother was old enough, she went to work at the tavern by the dock; quickly growing tired of her mother’s beatings, she married the kindest man she knew and moved into his family home. It took a year until the beatings began again, but he had a gentler hand than her parents. She had, in a strange way, been born and bred to be the wife of a drunk and she did this thankless station as well as she could; but now her husband was dead, and without his guiding hand she had little idea what to do. When she had her baby boy, the wet and wailing thing that he was, she could not believe that such a perfect being could have come from her. A mocking reminder of some distant good. Some women might have devoted themselves to that beauty they created but she had been broken beyond repair. She thought herself vile, lower than dirt and undeserving of any good; too dirty and too guilty to touch such a thing. The boy must have been for someone else entirely.
The priest had gone on far too long for a man undeserving of any memorial and, as if to hurry the end of the ceremony, rain began to come softly down on the hill. Sensing that he was losing his audience, the cleric wrapped things up quickly, and within minutes their cemetery was quiet again. Only Sebastian and his mother remained, perched above the hole as silent as they always were. Monuments to the life of a drunk. Two men with shovels and dirty smocks stood talking between each other at the bottom of the hill, their eyes fixed upwards. The rain was picking up and, afraid the workers might think badly of her for lingering, she called for Sebastian to come and he took one last look inside the grave, to be absolutely sure his father was dead, and took off down the hill after his mother.
Two nervous looking birds engaged in something close to play in the upturned branches of a small tree outside Sebastian’s window. Sharp splinters of old, green-painted wood, jutted out of the sill revealing the tan guts of soft wet wood underneath. The wind had steadily gotten worse over the days and the house made fearful clattering and groaning in its attempt to cast away its thin coil and return to the earth. It didn’t know that every bit of unused wood on the island was collected and hauled for burning in the fires of ships that would be sent forth to open waters, but that was hardly the worst fate for an old house. Some more forgotten homes remained standing against the calamities of the island like cankers on the skin. Long before their will had gone to keep out the elements, people would abandon them and wind would whistle through holes in the siding, and rain would drip from the roof into sad scenes of past living, leaking mildew and seeping mold, but there would be no purgation. It would remain standing and even, by the odd passerby, regarded as an awful blight on the landscape.
He woke to a dull pale light and shaking wind, his sheets soaked in what he could only know as sweat. Beneath the pained groans of the foundation he heard his mother downstairs, busying herself with sobs and wails. The world outside his window was gray and the vastness of sky rolled into sea in borderless expanse. He rose out of bed and climbed the crumbling stairs, with every footstep the inconsolable sound of pained pressure from the boards underneath. At the kitchen table he saw his mother with her head in her hands, covered in the kind of dark only their little kitchen could produce. She raised her head and the boy thought she looked like a banshee or some sea-witch; her hair frayed and wild and her face frantic. She narrowed her eyes at the boy with something close to malice, or guilt.
“Sebastian, oh, Sebastian come here and sit with your mother.”
The floor creaked as he crossed the room and took his place across the table from her. He watched the light struggle to make it through the small window that sat alone above the sink. The sun could try with all its might, but there was no stripping the house of dark.
“Your father… he was a good man. Remember that for me, Sebastian. When you’re feeling sad you have to remember that.”
Sebastian’s father beat him nearly as much as he did his mother, but he didn’t mind. That was simply touch. A hard caress. Sometimes, when he was feeling sad, he would stay out in town or wait in the tall grass outside the house until after dark just so he could feel his father’s hand on his backside to know for certain he was loved, and his father was never unaffectionate.
“I’ll remember,” said Sebastian, knowing it would make his mother happy.
“Good… such a good boy,” she wiped the tears from her face, “I have to work tonight but I’ll leave dinner on the stove. I’ll be back by morning, alright?” He nodded and leapt from the chair to make his escape.
Sebastian stood in front of their house watching the sun clear the horizon and settle firm in its mantle, the jagged outline of the city pressed up against the new red sky. The boy and his mother lived a long way from the city in the empty farmlands that sat in the center of the island. The house was situated among fields of weeds and grass stretching on to meet the towering cliffs that overlooked the sea. The boy passed split-rail fences, sumac and yellow moss nestled in between the stretches of cyclopean walls as he made his way to town. There was no single distinction between the two areas, like a feeling fading without some great catastrophe, slowly and undeliberate. Soft dirt and silvery fields gradually turned to harsh cobblestone and metal gates bordering towering stone buildings; rock walls separating shandy houses from neighboring patches of dead grass gradually became brick shops and glass windows. The view in the city obscured by some eldritch order instead of the older, more shambling meadows of pokeweed and wild rose and beachgrass far off against the dunes. He enjoyed the benign mystery the city held. From the front of his house, he could see everything, but in the city, vision was useless.
Sebastian took his usual route, cutting through the alleys like a high-tailed cat who had been let out of the house for the day without the slightest intent to ever return. Just before the busyness of town, where the sound of voices and crowds were faint in the distance, he turned down an alley and stopped. Cross-legged and still against the wall, a stranger sat among a flock of gulls; furtive gray things, still as statues at the man’s feet. There were plenty of people Sebastian didn’t know on the island, but even those he had never met had the distinct familiarity of a local to them, or the stink of a tourist who would be gone before the week ended. This man had neither, and when Sebastian’s foot came down on the stone the horde of gathering gray supplicants around the figure burst into frenzied flight to find some quieter street to loiter on. As he got closer, the first thought that came to mind was “sailor,” but Sebastian had either seen every sailor on the island, or enough of them to know what they looked like. Instead, the man looked like he had washed up from some distant island. His skin was neither tanned nor darkly hardened by the sun and wind, but blistered and red. Thirsty and desperate for a reprieve that the stranger would not grant and his hair was sandy and sparse and sat in thin strands on his head. The feeling of danger was foreign to the boy, he had never felt afraid before, even when his father was drunk enough to beat him without restraint, so when the hair stood up on the back of his neck he mistook it for something else entirely. Sebastian thought it a kind of curiosity, or anticipation that rested unpleasantly in his gut rather than high upon his chest. So, with little self-preservation, he walked towards the stranger.
“I heard about your father, boy.”
His voice sounded as if it had been stretched too thin and the feeling became too heavy in the bottom of his stomach to be mistaken for anything good. He wanted to ask the man how he knew his father but the words were caught in his throat, clawing futilely in an effort to become sound.
“You shouldn’t mourn the man. He was rotten and a drunk, you know that, boy.”
Sebastian tried to protest but he had gone mute. Instead, he took off through the alley
and didn’t stop until he reached the comfort of noise in the center of town, leaving the figure among the walls of stone.
Sebastian weaved through the crowd of tourists in the main square. He liked crowds and the people that made them up, in all their self-important posture or dainty pretenses. Blending into the sea of legs and feet there was no one to dote on him, no old woman to scold him, no man to thrash him. He preferred to be in the middle of town among the throng, but only during the summer did the island grant that peace. Even then, if one were to stray off the main street, the people quickly thinned out and the footsteps echoed and the only company that was to be found were the bazaars of gray gulls congregating in noisy prayer to some unseen force, old denizens in some long crumbling ruin.
The boy stopped at a makeshift wood stall with the word Confectionary painted delicately on the front in white paint and pink trimmings. A young woman ran the stand for her father, who set the business up by his wife’s baking, in an attempt to catch tourists before they made it to the city’s more proper bakery a few buildings further down. Sebastian preferred to stop here anyway. The girl was always kind to him and she, when he peered over to look at the cakes behind their little glass covers, would greet him with a high pitched, “Hello handsome,” and a warm smile. Sometimes, when she bent over the stall to hand him his cake, he could sneak a curious glance down the front of her blouse.
He began his dance through the crowd again, clutching the small box with his breakfast inside against his chest and moving with an invincibility that children often do, the world being something that moved around him, only ever grazing him and leaving just as quickly. When adults looked down, it always meant trouble, but they rarely did. It meant he was safe from their ire as he bounced between the skinny legs of the tourists, but not to one of his own. Just as he broke through the sea of people, she spotted him and pushed her way through the crowd in one forceful motion and caught him by the arm.
“Why didn’t you tell me your father passed away?” she scolded.
Sebastian scanned his surroundings looking for a means of escape but she had an iron grip on his thin arm. Anna was the only other child he knew, as she lived on a farm (that for a very long time had done no farming at all) a short way from him. He hated Anna, although didn’t fully understand why. She had a distinct air of bitterness to her that he couldn’t stand. She stank of the old women who clung to their windows, watching their streets like hawks for any disturbance or children unsupervised. Sebastian sensed this without fully grasping why, just as Anna adopted every last mannerism of the one and only adult in her life, her grandmother, without ever realizing it. Because of this, Anna resented Sebastian’s boyishness, and a relationship of oblivious animosity was the result.
She took a deep breath and repeated as if she were at a recital, “I am so sorry for your loss. If there is anything I can do for you, please let me know.”
“Let me go!” Sebastian tried to wrench his arm free of her fingers. It pained him to hear her parrot that kind of insincerity. He had stood at his mother’s side at the funeral and listened to every last adult say just the same thing.
“Have some manners, you idiot. I’m offering my condolences.” He finally yanked his arm free and took off running through the alleyway. He ran for his life, panting and stumbling through the mob, as he tried to gain distance from his assailer. There was somewhere he needed to be, and he wouldn’t let anyone make him late.
Sebastian slipped from an alleyway at the end of Main Street and, finally reaching the
pier, took his place in front of the ticket station. He sat on the steps, just to the side enough so that no one would ask him to move, and started eating his cake. Any moment the ferry would be sounding off in triumph as it lumbered onto the dock in great ceremony to let out its cargo of men and women. Sebastian would wait and watch them spill onto the shore of his home. Anxious and serious businessmen whose wives convinced them they needed a holiday, unimportant artists, looking for inspiration in dreamy seascapes and sandy cliffs; functioning alcoholics who were tired of drinking and bedding in the same old haunts, looking for a change of scenery to enrich themselves in. Sebastian thought that if all these people came here, thinking it beautiful, then the place they came from must be too horrible to imagine. He watched every last one crawl off the boat. The boy was practiced at watching, it was all children were allowed to do and so he became quite good at identifying the usual types that washed up on shore. What he liked most of all, and the reason he came to the docks every morning, was something else entirely. The deep mystery of the girls that visited the island. Some were daughters, ferried in with their parents, some came with lovers in hopes to fall even deeper in love, and others arrived in a crowd of friends to soak on the beach. Sebastian watched them now with something rising inside of him. He would scrutinize them all with a kind of eager curiosity. As if the world itself must lay somewhere in them, some secret within himself revealed by the way in which they moved. They would twirl off the ship in a flurry of flowing fabric, bright and light and full of life and they would dance across Sebastian’s vision like ballerinas, performing just for him, and just as quickly exit the stage into the crowds of the city never to be seen again.
“Sebastian, boy!” He heard a voice boom out from the bottom of the stoop.
The inspector, the only source of authority on the island, was standing stout in front of the sun with his hands tucked behind his back, “Ha! I know what it is you’re doing here, I do. I used to do the same when I was a boy. You’ve come to watch the men work, haven’t you? It was all I wanted to do when I was your age. I used to dream of living a life like them… Braving the sea, battling the elements, seeing far-off lands.”
Sebastian knew that if you let them, most adults would talk themselves dizzy. He didn’t mind the inspector though. He was always kind and he appreciated him not mentioning his father.
It came at first as a vague outline on the horizon, and as it approached it loomed like a behemoth lumbering closer into the harbor, as if it came from some other world, mechanical and alien. The dock master stood stern over his duty with his hands on his hips as men and women with spotless dress stood around him. He barked orders at a gangly group of young workers all in nervous anticipation of the coming ferry. A horn blew and bells chimed and the awful rumbling of the engines slowed as the ship reached its dock. The dock master shouted once again and he received some sign of assurance from the top deck and then there was a rattling of chains and a flurry of movement from the boat and shore. He received a hawser thrown from a ferryman and in an instant the vessel was secured and a ramp was slid onto the pier followed by whole mobs of people coming ashore with luggage in tow. There were shrieks of excitement from long awaited meetings and between the movement of longshoremen and bellhops receiving their guests’ luggage and declarations of lobster dinners and fresh fish and warm chowder the vacationers had gone as quickly as they came, tottering out of view into the maze that was the city.
As if in a dream, just as the last of the crowd dispersed, Sebastian thought he heard
the ringing of bells that drowned out all other sound, higher and more hopeful than the horns of the ferry. In a moment of sincere clarity that shattered every listless hour of his young life, he was aware that he was witnessing a moment he would remember forever. He could see his life, everything that would come to pass in a torrent, and knew that through it all, the image of this scene would bring him to ecstasy through the worst of it. A girl, as mesmerizing as Sebastian had ever seen, climbed down from the ferry onto the dock; the last to get off. Her father’s hand firmly resting on her shoulder, guiding her down as to make sure she did not slip through the gap into the water. Sebastian had never read poetry, nor did he have the presence of mind to realize what exactly he was seeing. He had seen the sweeping waves at dawn from the bluffs at the highest point of the island, the purple sky haunting the straggling beeches of the forest from the roads below, the green pastures dotted with horses and cows stretching out as far as the world went but Sebastian did not think of any of these things as beautiful. They had never been described as beautiful, nor had anyone looked at them in amazement or awe in front of him. The only thing he knew to be beautiful was himself, and only at the insistence of others, but he had very little idea of what the word meant. So now, as he watched this girl clumsily navigate the docks with shoes that did not seem to lend themselves to walking, the only thought that he could grasp was, “I’m looking at me. I’m looking at myself.”
“Who is that?” The words tumbled out of him without him meaning to, but the inspector answered in earnest.
“The Abneys. From the mainland. Very wealthy folk. I’m shocked you don’t know them, Sebastian. They stay for the summer nearly every year! Have a house up the glades.”
Sebastian didn’t think it was strange he had never seen them before, because at that moment, he was not thinking at all, “The girl?”
“Ah, Mr. Abney’s daughter, Isabella. Just a few years older than you. But don’t get any ideas, boy. With a face like yours she’d fall in love.”