Fisherman’s Wife

The sun cusps onto the Rodhópou peninsula, loses shape, sheds heat, slips beneath the edge of the sky to vanish beneath the lingering dwell of a day’s last moment.

The moonlight fishers now leave, their tiny craft trailing wavelets in the water’s now-pale peach. They climb the wave crests beyond the jetty, glide, dip, head unerringly into the void of the horizon. A vast tumult of greatness and emptiness awaits men who turn to the sea.

This evening as I watched them leave, the enormous mother of a waxing moon dragged the tide out of the harbour. A woman stood at the edge of the quay as the last of the boats passed.

She waved. His wave returned.

A gull teetered alone on the last edges of the day. Beyond the waveexchange, the fishing life loomed: the spectre of the women alone pushing the pram, the humdrums of the hearth, the broken grain on the stone, the leaden heat under the roof, the walls that need repair, the solemn-faced cafe men who don’t know how to comfort, the fear and grief in recurring husband-at-sea dreams. All in a wave.

When he was not quite thirty and the sun and sea had not yet tanned him into old-hull umber, before he had begun to be tired of the daily trudge to boat, before he had become embittered by falling prices and dwindling catches, before he had grown obsessed with income, before those things, he would come swiftly back to her, fath-

oming the way to the harbour of her as unerringly as the gull, pointing the tiller home with as much haste as the sea could provide.

Was it love that married them, or urgency, or affection? Loneliness?

How their first moments together must have been impatient and afraid. How they spoke in the long nights with eyes open in the dark, so unlike the eyes-open nights of now when he’s to sea. Trembling they must have been then, unquenchable love one moment and the unquenchable fear the next, that he would head out one evening and not come back.

The pretty harbour-side sea of peach-hued clouds is also a sea of no law and no mercy. She knows this, says it in the linger of her wave. He knows it too, says it in his wave back.

When the winter months thrash the jetty, still he must go. The sky thunders like shells in war. The wind breaks the gunnels and

the mast. When pouring ceases and storm winds fall, will the gull return?

When in their love-flamboyant mood a new bud broke and she was with child, what did his face look like when she told him? What were his words when her voice fell low? Did he nod and gaze at the ground, the prison of a man with no other life but the sea?

Men of the sea come and go through no wish of their own. Women say they understand. But they know in every hour there’s a moment of light, a moment of dark, a moment of wind, a moment of fear.

The daughter must be told that Dada sleeps at sea. She who had grown so familiar with his fatherhood hand.