Autumn corrected

I don’t know what it is but the Sea seems to have taken over Lake Superior which has been my go-to body of water all along, it just sort of comes and I let it, and then the atmosphere of the story changes and then the story itself.

I don’t know or understand the Sea. Good thing my characters do.

Thanks for being here.

by Sherry Cassells

Can you stand one more story about the Sea?

We lost Uncle Jack to the sea every spring. Late autumns he came back to us, a little listing at first, but after a week or so he righted himself and that’s when he start coming into the gathering darkness of my room at night to tell me stories of his adventures.

I put down my book and waited a few seconds of airless forever for him to begin, his moonlit hands churned with the story as if he were painting, spreading great swirls of ceruleans and phthalos to give me an idea of the sea, the real sea, the wild and distant one I didn’t yet know.

When I close my eyes there’s the lightfast sea he gave me with word and colour, beneath great clouds of tumbling dark and titanium light, no shore, the sea like the skin of a plum, at the horizon glimpses of nectar, the idea of a ship, the whip of a single white sail.

Perhaps in greater detail than I remember the people of my own life, I remember those who worked the ships with Jack, the preposterous few he painted for me in the dark, the ones who came through his stories with stories of their own.

His Australian friend Sandy who married another Sandy, and their sandy-haired children, all of whom were geniuses, his home a mechanical wonder, nothing existed without the realization of its equal and opposite, it was a kinetic kingdom. His son invented healing cream that replaced medical attention, the children were adventurers, they soared, they fell, they learned, they healed. His daughters grew eggplant and rhubarb in a bubbly mixture of pebble and flotsam. Together, all of the children built a storm shelter. His youngest son made a device involving a slide rule and a notched disk which whirred from one end, and from it, he, and only he, could predict the tides with 100% accuracy. A few of the middle children constructed a web-like flurry of bells that hung like musical gossamer between the house and the sea, its sharps and flats forecast storms, they knew the ones to attend and never missed an opportunity to huddle together in their shelter overlooking the sea and say oooooh and aaaaah.

Matty who lived with his mother in Scotland and cried for her on difficult nights. He had two extra thumbs, one per hand, and a deep trove of a voice. When they all sang before bed he looked up to the moon and whatever went on behind his gigantic Adam’s apple spilled into the night and sank beneath the darkness. Uncle Jack said he was such a big bag of nothing he was never without a swarm of rope and would tether himself to the gunnels when the sea picked up, those spare thumbs that jutted from the base of his others made Matty the best knotter to ever have lived.

Uncle Jack absorbed bits of each of them, that’s what we do, isn’t it? 

Sometimes I woke up to a knot he left on my pillow, so fierce and complicated, the moment I picked it up, it fell apart in my hands. He told me about the flurry of bells in his head and it was as if through his explanation the same web-like flurry self-constructed in my own head – there it goes – I don’t know what to make of it, how to read the sky according to make-believe notes on a make-believe scale, yet it jangles, its job perhaps less specific than weather prediction, I think all of its sounds mean the same one thing: NOTICE! NOTICE! NOTICE!

I found his stories unbelievable yet I believed them.

A man with no ears who heard through his mouth, another with a backwards eyeball who could see his own brain, a few scientists, some mad, a poet, always an astronomer, although all seamen believe themselves to be in this category. When he talked of the men who believed in heaven, his arms shoved the paint upward, I was out of my league, for we knew nothing of heaven in our house against the sea, and it nothing of us.

Eventually I met some of them, he brought Matty home for Thanksgiving one year, I heard him crying baritone through the wall. In the same room he allowed the gruesome madness of the one with the backwards eyeball, who was also the poet, to stay the winter.

There were others, a quandary of them, I have known oddballs.

And I had the excellent fortune of meeting the youngest daughter of the Sandys, Gayle, who is today my wife. She and my green-thumbed daughters wait for me, their bells on edge, they run out toward the sea, the stripes on their dresses loosening to the wind, all arms point in unison to the spot where the storm will gather, as if they are sorcerers, as if they conjure the storms themselves, as if they together are God, or, if you prefer, the Sea.

Taken by the Sea can mean death, or it can mean love.

We all had someone taken, not everyone returned, but Uncle Jack came back every autumn, a little shadowy at first, candlelit in the middle of the day, burnt umber and faded everything, each time it took longer for him to correct.

I was eventually taken by the sea, too.

When the sea calls it calls not only to the heart but to the brine in which it beats.

I never forgot about Uncle Jack during his absences, he was in a pre-flooded chamber of my mind, rowing and ageing, as I am now, for an instant I hope, in a chamber of yours.