*
92
“You can wear this until I can find some proper clothes for you,” Sicilia said reaching for what looked like a dark brown blanket hanging on a peg in a row of wooden pegs that stick out of a wall made of some kind of coarse alabaster. “Was my father’s cassock.”
I had climbed the natural stairs of the cliff following the women best as I could keep up with them. Barefoot as I was, not even having my moccasins, those pathetic things repaired so many times, and one last time in the engine room with some rags I had taken in secret. What could I do. My moccasins were lost in the sea after I had gone overboard. I accepted the cassock and began to strip my rags where I stood, as I had always done.
“My…” she said. “There is a room there. For that. Please..,” Sicilia said raising the cassock up covering me so she would not see. I covered my self in the cassock and entered the room in private.
I did not feel awake. None of it. Even to be alone for the first time over so long, too long to remove one’s clothes in private was like such a strange thing I thought I might not know how to do it right and be punished for it. But I went about it shivering, and then stood my pathetic lump of oily rags and my naked shivering body near them, and only wanting to put them back on and returning to the ship. Waiting for the whistle that would wake me up. Not the ship’s whistle. The ship did not have a whistle. I mean the one in the camp.
This was not like the dream. None of it. In the dream we danced for joy and ate food, the most delicious food one could imagine, as one always did, and met our friends and wives and children who cried happy to see us again. And we drank and ate all through the night together and then slept in the beds of our homes. But I was not happy and was ashamed of it. So I kept it to myself. I was most accustomed to not speaking at all. So I did not speak, or very little, or when asked, as I’d always done.
Sicilia had gone the next day to get me some regular clothes and shoes. I could not be seen in the rags, was obvious to give me away at least. Neither could I remain in the cassock of her father for very long. Their father, I mean. As I was dressed, Sicilia remarked when she returned, was too much for her to see, as I had a long beard and hair now that I believe remind her even more of their father. Any one might think so, would think so, and I did not want to see any one anyway or go outside. There was no desire even to see what was beyond the one room I stayed and the place the sisters would bring me the meals.
Sicilia had returned unable to find me any clothes. She would try again the next day. She asked Agail to help me in the bath, remarking on my dirty skin which I only notice when Agail she took my hand. Hers so white and smooth against mine caked with filth in between the fingers and creases of my knuckles. All over a constant layer of coal soot would build on the previous and grease hold it all together. One comes accustomed to it, and every other surface was the same anyhow. How could one know different.
Agail had filled the bath with buckets of water she heat on the kitchen stove. The steam rise from the tub so when I placed my hand in it I expect she filled the tub with sea water. The only warm I know was from the engine, and that steam was saturated with soot and oil, or the sea we crossed that steamed in the bright sun on the mornings much colder than the others. When the sea chop mixed with the steam looked as if it had frozen overnight and was breaking up in the bright sun. A bath of ice water is all I would ever hope for. And I never hope for a bath. The hot water shock my hand in that I wet myself where I stood.
Agail asked, “Why were you on that ship?”
She brought her fingers to my face. And felt my tears running down. Which made them run more freely. She wrap her arms around me to help me into the tub and removed the cassock. I did not want her to let me go. “Was oiler,” I answered. It was something.
“What’s an oiler?” she asked.
It was a start. It was a place to begin. And so I told her, pushing everything else away but how to speak, to tell, that it was my job to keep the mechanisms of the steam engine oiled so they do not overheat and dry up and lock up. In between the oiling I would wipe the surfaces of everything else, such as the gauges and handles and casings that become covered with oil and soot and accelerate their failure.
“Why were you an oiler?” she asked.
“I volunteered… said I knew about engines. Which was a lie. It was a way to get outside the others. Different kind of work. Anything. It wasn’t my idea.”
My throat was sore. Swollen rather, suddenly. I had to stop. Speaking. About that, anyway. So I asked her about the beach. Where we met. About what she was doing. Not about me. Anything. About the circle of stones she made around me. Was coal. “Why did you do that?”
“I made a frame around you,” she said. “So you could tell us what happened.” She took a bar of soap and rubbed in over my forearm, and then a bath cloth wet with the hot water back and forth over the same area. “I made a frame like a book has,” she said.
Cleaning me, of all people, I watched her. There was a small window up high. Too high to look out of. It wasn’t made of glass anyway, but some murky material like mica for light to come into the room and keep the weather out. When I spoke she would look at me while washing my limbs and individual fingers. She would look at the window when she spoke. It was a light of course. I forgot.
“When you dig a hole in the sand,” she said. “To get down to the water. The closer you are to the sea, the less you have to dig. The farther back from the shore, the deeper you have to dig. Either way it doesn’t matter, the water fills the hole. And the hole is the same as the book. The water is the story. And the frame is around you.”
Agail recite it with the rhythm of a song. A poem. “Was what my father told me,” she said.
There was the circle as the edge of the tub. And the gunwale of the ship. And then the row of timbers all lined up vertical in the snow and lashed together that made the fence around the camp. When Sicilia came later that day, with clothes for me, and we joined together for supper that evening, I told the two sisters everything. Everything I’d forgotten. The desire to speak was irresistible.
*
