Sea Hearts (31 page)

Seal-men I found to be very like our land-dads, possessive and anxious, patrolling the borders of the clan. When we went up on a beach, they must always be seeing other seal-men off, coming back blown and bloodied. Sometimes my fellows and I played at this man-work, but for us it was two rubber heads bouncing off each other, no teeth and no purpose, and the mams laughed lounging around us.

And then there were those sister-seals, our size, but not fighters. Those whiskery sea-maids, some part-human, most entirely seal, they slipped with us among the columns of sunlight. They blinked beside us through the roof of the world into the windy air, the new breath rasping in our nostrils. Like flung seeds or stones they moved, like arrows or bullets through the water, and like weed undulating away along the tide or teasing your face with a leaf-end.

I don’t know how to tell it all. Seal feelings are different from human ones, seal affections, seal ties with other seals. The best I can do is overlay a skin of man-words on the grunt and urge and song and flight and slump of seal-being.

Our mams belonged better under water than they ever had belonged above. Our mams found their wings, is how you might put it. They did not glory or revel or make any particular celebration, but only slipped back to rightness, went back about their business. The bulk of our mams was not beautiful as a man sees beautiful, but to seal-eyes as their black teardrops fell fast, flew fast, twisted through the home depths, they were lovely in their solidity and their speed. Each had her own self, with her own pattern of blotch and freckle, her own manner and song — each seal was clear-marked friend or stranger.

The days were long and unformed; the seasons beckoned us, then pushed us away behind them; stars rode over us, as did the moons in their boatishness or bulbousness; towns were a crust on the edge of our world’s eye and people were mites that crawled there. If I saw my father in that time, I don’t recall it, or recognising any man of Potshead — or Potshead itself! I would be hard pressed to know that it was Crescent Corner where I lounged or fought; recognition of a place, for a seal, takes count not of the landscape above but of the sea surrounding, the rocks and depths and kelp-beds nearby, the approach and escape, the presence already of friends and rivals. As the sea, beyond the point where men can see bottom, becomes to them only depths that hold their loves and livelihoods, so do the heights become to seals only wastes of dry blaring light from which weather and occasional dangers descend.

I felt no pull to the land. I barely knew that I
knew
the land; land thoughts deserted me and I neither reflected on the past nor anguished about the future. I only was; I only knew — or I learned by following and doing — where to go, how to behave; I only followed flurries of friends and of fish, took flight from enemies, sang what songs seemed to require to emerge. I came ashore and basked in the sun; I slipped back away from the lumberous, slumberous earth-life, and took flight again, took life, in the under-sea.

‘Sealers found it out,’ says my dad when he has re-lit his pipe. ‘As you’ve probably heard.’

‘Well…’

‘Or sealers knew already — sealers’ grandpas and great-grandpas had all told them. I dare say stories last better on those boats, they are so long off land and must amuse themselves.’ The room brightens as the window-light catches in his puffs of pipe smoke. ‘At any rate, the first seal they saw for what he was was Will Canker. You could not mistake him, they said — he was all over stitches, stretched out, where his mam had made them in the rabbit or the lambskin. So they did what they do: they cut along those lines, but not deeply, and they let the seal bleed out. And then when the skin clung close and Canker inside started to kick, they cut him free and put him on the boat. The skin went back to…to lambskins, it was, with Will. He had it with him when he stepped onto the dock here at Potshead six weeks later. So they didn’t need a witch with them for that, we learned from sealers; all it is is knives and the beast itself, its double nature coming out.’

The pipe-smoke has spread into a cloud around Dad’s head. Evening is coming. I am glad we have the fire going, to counter the cheerless grey-blue light.

‘So you didn’t know this before Willem Canker came back,’ I say, ‘that lads could be cut out of seals?’

‘We hadn’t even known that lads could be put in!’ he says with a bitter laugh. ‘If we had, we might have kept our wits closer about us. No, when you went, we had no hope, Daniel, ever, of getting any of you back. Willem stepping off that boat was like the world starting to spin again. Men came back to life, put away the drink and the weeping, smartened themselves up thinking their sons might arrive from the sea and find them in this shameful state. There were men went down spring and summer to Crescent Corner with their knives, eye out for young bulls with the seams all over them, but only your friend Raditch and Feenly Cooper ever came up there.’

Dad lays aside the pipe, clears his throat. ‘We went to Misskaella, a crowd of us, to ask if she could bring you up — only as seals, mind. We didn’t want any strenuous magic of her; we would do the cutting ourselves. Well, I don’t know, maybe the bringing
is
the wearisome part, but she would have none of it. Any more than she would consent, right after you left us, to bringing up new wives, for those few men who could afford them. We lost our younger men at that time, all our marriageables, as well as our boys. All off to mainland they went, the bachelors, and the ones that found wives did not bring them back to Rollrock, but found occupation there, with Cordlin’s fleet or on Knocknee farms. And I am glad to say, neither would Misskaella bring up one single sea-maid, contributed for with pooled bits of money from low sorts in the town, with the idea that they would all use her, pass her from man to man. She had had her fill of us, the witch said. We were not to come moaning to her. She was done with seals and seal magic.

‘You cannot blame her; she was already quite old and ill. She was owed money, too, by some of the men; they had gone back on their agreements once the wives were lost to the sea; they drank away their wage and she saw none of it. Not that she was in need, her nor Trudle nor Trudle’s girls. Misskaella has made her fortune out of us — you’ve seen her house on the hill, haven’t you, so stuffed with treasures a person can hardly step inside? And Trudle had wanted for nothing once she birthed that first bab. So
she
had no reason, did she, to put herself out for us? All that we found of you we had to find on our own. So some, as I say, kept an eye on Crescent, and others, as you well know, went by the Skittles every chance they had when the seals were there, and other dads went farther a-sea and searched the other islands. And every season since, some of you have come back, skins in your arms to show what you were, from wherever the sealing-boats docked once they took you off the ice.’

I shudder. ‘Toddy Marten still has nightmares of those boats. Though they locked him up below decks, he said, still there was the smell.’
Mams being rendered
down,
he said to me, and the words toll in my head, but I cannot speak them, just as Toddy could hardly get them out.

‘We could as well stop the seal-trade as hold the sun down in the morning,’ says Dad. ‘And some of us it tortured, the thought of what they did, and some were glad, I am ashamed to say, that mams and colonies should suffer as we suffered. But all of us went down to meet the boats each day, in hope of some word, or of some actual boy, our own boy, stepping off the gangplank to us. I did go there, every day, until you came, and if a sealer had brought you, Daniel, instead of our own fellows, even if that sealer were slathered all up and down with sea-wives’ blood, with a bloodied pick at his belt and a seal-tooth necklace on him, still I would have embraced him, and called him my brother forever.’

There’s a glint in his eye, and he lets me see it a good long minute before it passes into a twisted smile. ‘We never really owned those women,’ he says, ‘however much we married them and called them wives to the death. But our lads, well, you were at least half ours. I suppose we thought we had a right to claim you back. Otherwise,’ and he leans forward, pipe in hand to me, ‘who would we have to fill our pipes for us, and bring us grandchildren to brighten our old age? Oh, there’s plenty have no one,’ he continues, watching me knock out the bowl against the fireplace and pick up the pouch. ‘But they’re still hoping, mark my words. The ones who gave up hope, they went, off Chisel Top or swimming out Six-Mile in the winter storms. The others, though they might not go out and search themselves, still meet the boat each day, never knowing when their lad might show.’

I was born again and I came out crying — a lot of us did, they say. There never was such a race as the seals for mawking and moping. Out into a driving rain I was brought, part bound tight and part bursting from the lambskin Mam had made for me. All sounds hurt my ears, the rain-hiss on the rocks and the men’s voices: ‘Daniel Mallett! Welcome home, boy!’

‘Mallett? That’s the boy that worked up Wholeman’s, no? That stole the coat-room key the night they left? We should throw that one back, and without his skin, too.’

‘Shall you take the skin to Dominic Mallett, then, Clift, and tell him his son fell over the side?’

‘Hush you both! The lad has ears, you know.’

‘Oh, paff. They lose their language under there; you’ve heard them.’

‘Don’t mind him, lad. Your dad will be right glad to see you.’

They cut and cleared the skin off me. The weight of me fell out, onto a sloping rock that was wet with blood; it had run and run, right off the edge down there and into the sea. Legs rose all around me and faraway faces leered; here, closer, the man with the knife crouched, and slapped my face, and beamed, and wiped his eyes. Behind them one of the Skittles rocks towered, and I mistook it for a huger person yet, all shoulders and no face; I tried to bring my arms up to protect myself, but I had no strength in them; I had forgotten how to use them.

Amid the brute noise then and the confusion, I recognised the blurred uppers of a fishing-boat. They carried me onto it, and laid me raw-skinned and bony-shouldered on the deck. Some man put a rope-coil under my head, which pressed into me painfully. I was trying to accustom myself to my man-eyes and what they showed me through the air. All the bulk had gone off me; how was it that I felt so much heavier? And everything was heavier around me, glued to the deck; the men shuffled stuck there to the boards; none of them could fly, and neither could I any more.

Around me the air racketed; every movement was quick and startling, every contact sudden and loud, throwing out more noise. To no rhythm, the land-men moved and swore and fumbled, the men of my town, of my land-life, and the sea-birds stuttered in the sky. And I was crushed flat to these remnants of my coat, pressed to the damp wood by this sea-grass blanket, that held in what little warmth I had. The only thing the wind could do was push the damp hair back and forth on my brow; it could not lift and return me to the water; it could not lift even this knotted knitted thing off me.

It was an ill-making dream, and the men came by, smiling and patting and consoling me, all the way home.

‘Nobody holds what you did against you, Daniel, don’t you worry.’

‘Well, only men like Clift, and their good opinion’s not one you need hanker after.’

‘A lad that loves his mother above all, well, didn’t we love them above all too?’

They required nothing of me; they did not expect me to speak with this strangely packed mouth, out of this flat face with its new framework of jaw, using this new voice all strings and hollows. The sky lingered, never to be veiled by seawater as I took my breath and dived with it below. The illness went on, and through it, the men’s mutter-and-crooning slipped together, interlocked into items of sense. (‘Didn’t we want them happy, in the end?’ ‘Only none of us could put ourselves aside enough, and our own convenience.’ ‘It’s true, the lads only did what we should have done ourselves.’) They welcomed me; they were welcoming me back. They spoke of their gladness, and of the preciousness and rarity of sons. I was one among their sons, it seemed. These were changed men from the ones I was beginning,
just
beginning, to remember.