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15 OCTOBER 1950 – AMNESTY BAY, ME
Slowly, Tom Curry wiped the last scraps of grease and dirt from his hands. The control system for the lighthouse was a beast of a thing – a legacy of pre-war days, at a time when a lot of similar fittings were being ripped out and replaced with modern electronics – but she was a lady, she responded to care and attention. A relic, maybe, but a valuable one. There were times when Tom had to remind himself that, now, maybe, he fit into the same category.
He glanced at his watch. A little before five. Time to head back to the cottage and start things going for dinner. He and Arthur had the place to themselves this weekend – Mary had gone down to Bangor to visit her parents and taken Orm with her; the boy had been acting up a bit lately, but he always welcomed seeing Grandma and Grandpa. Perhaps he’d have some time to talk more with Arthur. His elder son had been too curled in on himself lately. He was at least working – deckhand on one of the local lobster boats – but he’d become more and more private, even anti-social, since leaving high school last year. Tom could understand it – you couldn’t do a job like his unless you could be comfortable with just your own company. But, he acknowledged, he didn’t have Arthur’s particular problems.
Much though he loved Mary, this was a time that he wished Atlanna were still here. There were still times when he looked back on those years like it was some kind of fairy-tale – not surprising, maybe, when you saw it as a down-home Maine working slob marries an honest-to-God princess of Atlantis, a place that was supposed to be a legend. They’d been good together. But she couldn’t settle; part of her insisted on going home – and, if she hadn’t been tagged by a shark or a U-boat or something, hopefully she’d made it. He’d got through the loss, helped Arthur survive it.
But Atlanna, princess or not, wasn’t human. At least not regular Homo sapiens, anyway. Homo maris, maybe. “Man of the sea”, which was a natural home to her. She could breathe, move effortlessly, even at depths which you’d think would kill from the sheer pressure of the water. Arthur had inherited all that stuff from her. When he’d been just coming up on five, he’d gone missing in the rocks around the lighthouse and Tom had been agonized, thinking the boy drowned – and then his mom found him swimming in a shallow pool and playing with some fish. Tom had always known that his wife was different – only then did he really understand just how different.
Growing up had made things worse in some ways. There had been a couple of times Arthur had almost died; Atlanteans couldn’t be separated completely from water. The boy needed to feel it on his body at least once an hour or the dehydration would kick in so hard, it’d kill him in a matter of minutes. It sounded crazy put like that, but seeing it almost happen had torn him open. There was no way he could do a landsman’s job like that, and crewing with Bob McAllister had been a perfect solution. He was a natural, Bob said. The lobsters and the fish seemed to come up to the boat like Arthur was their best friend in all the world.
For all that, though, there was a gloom over Arthur that Tom didn’t see as anything you’d expect from a seventeen-year-old boy just starting to find his way in the world. A couple of times in the last few months, he’d woken up in the night and looked outside to see the boy sitting hunched up on a rock by the waterside, just looking out at the ocean looking like Pinocchio wishing on a star.
Tom’s own father would have just dismissed it as the boy being “goddamned moody, needs to snap out it and get back to the real world”. But Zeke Curry had been everything that Tom aspired not to be as a father.
The path from the lighthouse to the cottage was a little over a mile long. The grass was still long, the summer had been good but not too hot to kill the grass too much. Tom glanced over the kitchen garden; Mary was trying to grow tomatoes and some herbs, perhaps not to too great success up north here in Maine but sometimes it worked.
No sign of Arthur as yet, but there was still another half-hour before the tide turned, so it’d likely be a while. Tom was heading into the kitchen to wash his hands before starting to cook dinner when he saw the envelope on the table, propped up against the cruet set. He hadn’t seen that when he went out to the light this morning.
A plain white envelope with just the one word on it. “Dad”, in Arthur’s handwriting. Tom looked at it like it was a bear-trap; he picked it up with the same slow care, slipping a finger under the flap and tearing it open. The letter was written on good quality paper – heavier stock than you’d expect and a light gold in colour, not bright enough to obscure Arthur’s hand in black ink. Tom unfolded it carefully.
“Hi, dad,” the letter began. “By the time you’re reading this, I should be long gone.”
What? A thought came to Tom; he dropped the letter on the table, ran up the staircase. Privacy be damned, he burst into Arthur’s room. Maybe a few things missing, nothing over much that he could tell. But there was one place he could be going that he couldn’t pack anything of his land-bound life and take with him.
Tom slowly returned to the kitchen, picked the letter up again where he’d left it.
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking these last few months, and I’ve realised that I can’t stay here. There are questions I have, things that I feel I have to do, and I can’t do them while I’m working lobster pots in Amnesty Bay.
“I know I’m different from other guys my age. And I’ve got at least some understanding of why that is. You told me about Mom’s people, wherever they are, and I can still remember enough of her to ask myself about some of the things you couldn’t tell me.
“I know there’s a lot of ocean out there, and I look out at it some nights and I can hear it talk. It’s telling me, come on Arthur, come take a look. There’s so much out here to see and you’re one of the few people who can come see it.
“The fish hear me, you know that. Everything from the tiniest guppy to the biggest and meanest shark can tell me what’s on their minds, small as they are sometimes. They speak to me. I can speak for them. I’ve found that I can persuade them, sometimes even force them to do things. Not something I like, even if it can be useful.
“I know you’re reading this and saying, is it my fault? Is it something I did that drove him away? No, Dad, never that. I love you and you’ve been the best father a boy could have wished for. Never blame yourself. But I’m not a boy now. I’m a man and I can make the decisions that a man has to make.
“One of these days I’ll come back. I have too many questions right now and I need to find some of the answers before I can come back.
“But this isn’t the end.
“Love always, from Arthur.”
At the bottom of the letter, Arthur had printed out in block lettering the lines from a poem that Tom had read to him when he was young, one of his own favourites. John Masefield’s words rang through his head:
“I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky, / And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.”
Arthur didn’t need a ship; he could go where no ship could go. Tom had done his best to give the boy a good heart; let that be enough of a star to steer by.
Fare ye well and come home safe…