Earlier - years it could have been, but somehow I knew it was only days - I remember myself crying. I remember thinking my father invincible, that he could sail to the ends of the earth and face storms and all the sea’s wrath and still come home unshaken. I had already lost so much with my mother’s premature death. I had assumed, I guess, that the world owed it to me to be merciful, that I could not lose any more. I had loved Father, loved him so dearly. He told me that when he became an old man and no longer had the strength to sail, he would hand off his boat to me. I remember myself taking his promise solemnly but with obeisance; I felt then that I had been granted a great honor, a privilege. The boat was small, but it was my father’s and he had built it himself - just after I was born, he said. Just after Mother died.
How young I was then. I remember working even harder after that, not wanting at all for my father to in any way regret his entrustment; I was so proud of myself. I practically begged for him to take me with him on the trip he was planning to take down through the Atlantic; I was met with polite but adamant refusal. It was his last sail.
He said three years. That’s what he’d said, and he had been gone well into a fourth before we realized we had given up hope. Still, the news that the fragments of a medium-sized sailboat had washed up on the northern shore of Boa Vista, with the word Mariner engraved on its side, came as a shock to us; more than anyone, to me. I guess I’d imagined that as long as the boat survived, my father could never die. The boat was part of him, as much as his arm and leg. He had toiled for nearly two years on that thing, carving, polishing. That’s what he told me, at least. Sailing was his life. And it was his death.
I was engulfed in sadness, of course. It latched onto me and clawed me and tore me apart like Father’s boat. He was dead; he was dead and everything he had worked for, his life and soul and his promise, everything was gone. I wept much in the days that followed.
But slowly the misery evolved and twisted itself into nothingness. All that remained was a sonorous feeling of emptiness, of vacuum. Sometimes I would sit for days in the cabin of my grandfather’s boat, not thinking, not feeling. The waves would come; they would come and roll up against its side, and the boat would rock, and they would disappear. How stupid and transient all things are, how deep and tenacious the emotions that they entail.
But my grandparents were kind: they let me be. They would come, of course, every few hours, and give me food, and I would eat what they gave me. I would be just as content to starve. Days passed, and time kept pushing forward. When Grandmother told me that we would hold a funeral for my father a few miles downriver at the cemetery, I answered, “Why? He’s already gone.” My grandmother pitied me, unraveling her fat lips sympathetically; she had bent over me and embraced me around my neck.
So we had set off, massive sails and great, majestic spinnaker arching like tree limbs in the wind. “A few miles downriver” was, of course, an understatement: our trip spanned an approximate one hundred fifty miles, my grandfather had told me, ending far downstream, near where the Connecticut River launched off into the ocean. My grandparents didn’t own a car; a boat was all they needed, they said.
It was near the end of our voyage, I think, when I saw the church resting there like some monument on the side of the river, broken down and made unusable by years of weathering. It was archaic but elegant, bearing the enigmatic beauty and attraction of the very old. Its threadbare walls, its ceiling, lined with holes; its incomprehensible ancientness reached into the void of my mind and unlocked something; fluttering upwards, it perched itself atop my skull and remained there, letting its light wash over my face and arms. I wanted to see the church, to walk along its walls, to slip inside through some sodden door, to run my hands along its floor, surely having long become indistinguishable from the moist soil beneath it.
I was refused. “It’s unsafe,” my grandmother chided. “A wall could fall on you, or the ceiling collapse. I don’t want you going in there.” I retreated halfheartedly to my pale sanctum.
Another hour or so passed, and I was eventually eased from my subconscious state by my grandfather’s call. It floated down through the open cabin door, dreamlike and eerie, and passed invisibly through my ear, where it lurched downwards, plunging with ferocious velocity, and landed with an echoing discharge on some rigid surface. I awoke.
Unspeaking, I let my feet pull me upright and carry me onto the stern. My eyes trailed magnetically to the church, perched on the opposite side of the river, now closer and larger: I could see with astounding detail the crevices and holes that lined its near wall.
I don’t know how long I had been staring at the church before I noticed Grandfather, standing beside me with his eyes following mine. I looked up at him. I wondered if he was going to scold me for still wanting to go to the church. Father never scolded me. He was always so patient, so empathetic. That’s what I had loved about him, I realized - his graceful composure. He had been so beautiful in life.
“Do you want to help me with the anchor?” asked Grandfather, glancing down at me. It was a command, not a question. I said I would. My voice was quiet.
We climbed up onto the bow, me following him. The anchor was lying inside a bag, prevented from falling off the boat by a wooden rail that encircled the bow, save for the area where it connected with the stern.
“You can go ahead and toss it in,” said Grandfather. “I’ll help if you need me to, but I’m not as strong as I used to be.” He chuckled at this remark.
I knew what to do. Father had more than once instructed me in how to properly drop an anchor. I walked to the edge of the stern. Not trying to hide my apathy, I spread out my feet in automatic anticipation of the weight of the anchor; I bent, turning in order to reach the anchor, which was to my right now. It was heavy, far heavier than my father’s anchor.
“No,” I said. “I can’t lift it.” I turned and retreated to the center of the stern and sat down. Everything was so gray, so pointless.
“That quick to decide?” asked Grandfather. I didn’t answer. Grandfather sighed, walked over beside me, and sat down. After a pause, he murmured, “You’re still thinking about your father, aren’t you?” Again, I didn’t feel a need to respond. I saw him look at me, then return his gaze to the opposite shore. We were facing the church. “I hear you’ve taken a liking to that old church over on the other side.”
I heard my heart speed up almost imperceptibly. Now that Grandfather’s attention was on it as well, the church’s colors appeared ever more regal and luxurious. I glanced around tentatively.
“You don’t have to worry – Grandmother went ashore to pick up some dinner. Tell you what. You can go to the church.”
“You have a canoe?”
“Grandmother took it. But we have a dinghy. It’ll do.” Grandfather rose; he reached for the anchor and, grasping it firmly in one hand and holding the chain rode in the other, all but threw it into the water. I heard a splash, then later the ringing of the rode clashing against the boat’s side as Grandfather tightened the cleats. As the old man was dismounting the bow, I called to him.
“You’re strong enough to toss the anchor.”
“Yes.”
I thought for a moment. “You were testing me,” I concluded.
“Smart boy,” said Grandfather. As he was descending into the cabin, he looked back up at me. “Dinghy’s at the back of the boat, if you want it.”
I nodded and smiled.
ЖЖЖ
I had always been good at rowing. The link between my hands and the paddles was but another joint for me, an extra elbow; I felt the water lap up against the paddles’ wooden mouths, writhe upward along their sides like they were my own hands, my own wrists. Father had often praised me for my proficiency in rowing. I realized I had never actually seen him in control of a canoe - it would always be me or someone else rowing, or he would swim, or some other circumstance would serve as an excuse for him. I wondered how he had managed to evade it so effectively. Even more I wondered if he had been able to row at all.
It was a clumsy dinghy. Most dinghies were for me, considering that I had been rowing in the canoe my father had provided me my whole life. A thin blue cloth surrounded the frail plastic that held in the air, and it scratched arms as they pulsed forward and backward, synthesized in beat with the rhythm of the river.
I heard a rubbing noise, and felt rocks pushing upward against the dinghy’s flimsy bottom. I hadn’t been paying much attention to my progress, for my thoughts had lain elsewhere. I had gone quickly, I observed, though this could very well have an illusion precipitated by my distracted mind. It must have been: I looked back, and my grandparents’ huge boat, now a respectable distance away, looked small and humble.
I got out and pulled the dinghy ashore. There was only just enough room for it; any less and it would have easily have gotten abducted by the river’s swift current. The shore was steep and rocky, leading quickly into a thick wilderness. I managed to lodge my shoe in a foothold and haul myself up the rock’s surface.
As I rested on the dry soil of the forest, feeling a bit windswept, I realized how close I was now to the church. Surprisingly, I didn’t experience any sudden desire to stand up and run to it, as a foolish child would to a candy store. No - mine was a much more subtle yen, subtle and yet infinitely stronger. I did not care to be able to tell Grandfather after my expedition that I had found a church - I wanted to be able to tell him that I had found myself.
I stood up, rested, and began walking. The shrubbery was thinner near the edge, near the stone precipice, and I tried to tread as far to the side as possible, so much as I didn’t let myself step into a precarious position. The riverside was angled at a slight uphill, but I had exerted little energy in the ride across the river (the rest was merely a rejuvenation of my composure after climbing the rocks), and so this proved hardly a detriment for me. Below me, the river rippled in a shimmering phantasmagoria.
At last I reached the church. It lay in its ruined state in a large clearing, at the border of which trees stretched their limbs probingly. I walked onward. It could no longer be identified as a single structure: disembodied columns rose from the undergrowth like elongated coffins, vines forming a labyrinth across their surfaces; fragments of long-crumbled rooftops jutted out of the ground; walls, once vast and coordinated, now stood in tense adjacency like great medieval dominoes. It was beautiful, it was just as I had imagined it, and yet....
I strode restlessly through the church’s remnants, feet always bouncing against some piece of a wall, or the roof, or the stone body of some unidentifiable saint. I had been hoping that the church might somehow provide the torch I needed to navigate the cave of my life. Yet nothing was clear. Why did it call to me, then? Why that...compulsion, to come here?
My foot caught, and I fell. The side of my face landed painfully upon the hard soil; as I opened my eyes, I noticed with a dull relief that I had missed by mere inches the base of a collapsed pillar. With some difficulty, I raised myself to my feet. My knee stung; it was bleeding.
I limped over to the wall on my right and sat. I wondered vaguely how Grandfather had coped when Mother died – years ago, only weeks after my birth. Father told me that she had died of a very bad disease, and that was enough to satisfy my curiosity in those early years of inquisitiveness; it still was. But the despair, the reluctant submission to fate’s wishes – how could one master such a thing? I had let it take hold of me and whip me until I grew numb, until I felt neither pain nor emotion, while my feet were held to the ground like anchors to a sea floor. Did Grandfather have to go through this? Desperately I wanted to ask him, but the church held me back. I could not leave it. Not yet.
I stood up and noticed that I had been leaning not against stone but against wood – wood which, to my surprise, appeared fairly well-kept. By the hinges and dark cracks that framed its countenance, and by the metallic knob that erupted gracefully from it at shoulder-height, I could tell that what I was seeing was an ancient door. Why was its wood not rotted away? If it was as old as the ruins that surrounded it, it would not exist. I lifted my arm and slid my hand down its surface; it felt healthy. No – this door had come much afterwards. But why? Who would bother putting a new door in the doorway of an ancient church?
Was this what was calling me?
I felt my hand touch the brass doorknob, felt it turn, felt it pull. And I was stepping through the doorway.
