of Christmas
by
Jim Parker Dixon
Copyright 2012 Jim Parker Dixon
ISBN: 9781311469748
‘There’s nothing left. There’s nothing left to eat.’
I knew that this was how it was. Being ill so long, I’d lain for days and watched my father give up his share of bread for me. Today he had given up the last we had.
‘But don’t you mind,’ he said, ‘I’ll take the boat and see what I can catch. I’ll save the best for you.’ He hesitated as he stood, seeming not to have strength enough within himself. But at last he took and broke some driftwood and let it fall into the stove. It caught and brightly burned. Flame bred flame, and light lived off the salt and wind dried wood.
‘While I’m gone, my little one, stay close up by the fire. Be still, stay warm. If sleep comes, sleep. I’ll be back before it’s dark.’
He took warmed water from off the stove and poured it out into a cup. Thin steam fingers, light as air, rose and formed against the coldness of the room.
‘Drink,’ he said. I bowed my head and sipped a little.
‘It tastes of stones,’ I said. The water’s heat felt easy on my dry and cold-burned lips. I drank again.
He pulled a blanket tight around me. The blue of it, creased and calm and easy: and I remembered the sea last summer. The sun’s full light played clear through waves that gave themselves, breath after breath, to the stone beach. I made my breathing like the breath of the sea.
He said: ‘You still look pale, your eyes are circled red.’
‘I’m tired, that’s all.’
He said: ‘But, I think, thank God, your fever's down. You’ll be well enough to go to church this Christmas Day.’ Today was Christmas Eve. The thought of Christmas. The way everything on Christmas Day seemed new and alive. I would be well again and new again.
He moved to the window and looking out said, ‘Now’s the time. If I don’t go I’ll miss the light and tide.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I don't mind. Be safe.’ He smiled again. ‘Now mind you sing something happy while I’m gone; and with your sweetest voice. So the fish will lift their heads out the water to listen.’
For the first time in days, his care left me. His thoughts were for himself. And for the boat and the wind and sky that had only a little brightness left. He prepared himself for work and for the cold and the sea. He looked at me a moment. Then took down his coat and made to leave.
His boot steps on the boards sounded out his leaving. When the door snapped shut on the latch behind him, and he was gone, I was added to the silence of the house. This is what all those who are left alone will know: without others, we are things among things. We grow towards them, and they towards us. The chair into which I curled took a human form: A lap, legs, two arms to hold me. The bed where my father slept seemed a sickening man, blanketed. The doorway in the corner of the room, hanging open, was an open mouth. An empty space lay beyond. The hall, a hollow, hungry throat.
These bad thoughts bred a little fear in me. I lent towards the fire and tipped water from my cup onto the stovetop. The heat rebuked the slight. But this was a water sacrifice. I prayed for kind seas, for the souls of the fish my father catches, for his safe return.
I did not sing for him. And I did not fight to stay awake. Weakness drew me back to sleep. And I slept, suddenly, and as deep as the sea.
I awoke, icy stiff and my mouth sand dry. The stove was dimmed; now grey with ash, but with red enough hidden within to fire the cinders. I lay unmoving. The fever had fed full from my strength. I was a paper child, remote from myself.
What makes movement move? Not a thought. But a body made of life. But life was halved in me. I was brittle with cold. Slack with sickness. And still he was not back. No fire. No food. No one to light the lamp. I gave no thought to waiting. I could not wait. I dare not wait. Of waiting alone for evening. So I had to go to meet him. I would have to go down to the shoreline, to meet the boat. The boat, with flooding sail: I would see it press home, escaping sea and night. Haul the catch and hear the story of the voyage out and back.
The first crest, he'd say, then the boat grips and loses its dead weight amongst the water. Leaving the land, to bond with the wind, to make that uncertain course across the backs of the waves. The tide admits the craft, and the sightless, coursing gales take it out deep into dark water. How this lonely sea craves the company of men! And all I have for company are the souls of lost men running along the whitening rim of the waves, trying to make land and home to see their children!
And I would take along the little boat I made for him. From tack and canvas, a driftwood keel, I had stitched the sail as I lay ill. We’d try it in the shallows. And dry it off and bring it home and my father would right the rigging and show me how to dress the sails and make it fit. And we would eat tonight, and sleep all the better. Yes. I would brave this darkening. I would go now and meet him down upon the shore.
Without asking, movement came. I pushed back the blankets and felt at once the true cold of the room. And I tried to stand but this was too much. I tried to grip the chair but my hands had forgotten how to close, how to hold. My limbs were air, yet heavy: they did not answer to my intent. I struggled again and again and I found my feet.
A moment to right myself: breathe, and straighten, and move a little. I asked my fingers to work again. They struggled with the buttons of my coat. I pulled the blanket about my back like a cloak and turned it around the boat I’d made. I looked back upon the chair where I had lain that while. It held my shape. I was there, and yet I was gone. The house, now, seemed so unfamiliar, so unalive, as I made my leaving.
Outside, the winter’s day had bowered our little house in light’s last. It was still and cold enough to draw down chill mist between the trees. I took the quicker path to the sea, through the Potter’s Field. Little grew there. They used to say it was like the field that Judas bought and where Judas died before the devil took his soul. This land was bad: bramble, nettle and thorns.
The track I followed split the coarse grasses. The hoarfrost had burned ashes upon the arms and hands of the close hanging trees. Underfoot the boot-turned mud was frozen black. And the ploughed field beyond was folded wave after wave. The land was stirred by tides and roused by wind then forgotten. I had watched the horse teams with the plough that autumn, before the first frosts. I watched their quiet strength and patience in toil, their obedience to the whip.
And then I walked further on into the copse and past the limekiln, whose fire burned for days and nights. It was burning now. The smoke fought the cold air and fell loose and slow between the bare trees. And between the trees weaved the figure of a man, huge and devil black. He was the man that fed the fire; he kept watch through the night. He stopped his work, and from a distance I sensed he set his eyes on me.
Then I was at the gate. Relief now as the frozen path gave way to the stones and shingle of the beach. I walked on towards the waterline. The waves turned gently onto the sand and fell back. I saw no sign of my father.
Back up the beach I walked, up to the broken boat, the one that was long left, and left to rot in the salt wind. We’d sit inside and my father would say we were just like Jonah in the whale. The old dead boards stuck out like ribs. I sat inside it for a while as I waited. I waited.
The light lessened. I found myself shouting out. Suddenly I called to him. Then louder, drawing out his name. I pitched his name onto the wind. The sound frightened me. I felt the wind close its hand around the sound and carry it away. My young voice strained. I sounded foolish and so small against the world. The gulls, thrown upon the limbs of a gale, turned and scorned. Still staring out to sea I saw the sky scale and flash in blue greys, like th
e flesh of a fish. The sun cut a yellow ribbon at the horizon and it shone full in my face. A strange light. In a moment it was gone.
I took another way back. By the long road towards the village and the church, which, as it turned, would turn me back to home. The light was going from the sky, but it held in the west. I relied upon firmness of the stone road to keep my way. Ahead there were bright windows. The church. And I walked on a little more.
The land that lay around the road was dark against the sky. Everything had disappeared: any shape, any sense of life, and all distances. But I trusted the road, and I was less alone to be moving. Suddenly voices.
‘What’s this the cat coughed up?’
There were young men. One each side of the road. I stopped and they closed in on me.
‘I’d call it a scrag.’
‘Now, now. That’s no scrag. That scrag’s the fisherman’s scrag.’
Laughter.
‘These ones fight when you catch ‘em don’t they?’
‘They scratch and bite.’
‘What does she call herself?’
‘I’d call her a fishwife.’
‘Now who, but a fish, would have this as a wife?’
They looked me over.
‘Not I, not I. For a scrag like this would sicken me when I came home.’
‘I couldn’t look upon her.’
‘Can she cook? Clean?’
‘I