Farmer Swimming

The ocean is filled with strange things.

I know, because I am one of them.

I didn't used to be, and I don't belong. 

I was a land-man: a man of fields and barns and houses. I had never been on a boat in my life, but one day I bartered my loudest chickens and my driest jerky for passage on a great boat headed across the sea, to visit a half-foreign land.

The captain (a vacillating man with muscular red gums sea-seasoned skin) told me the vessel would be heading somewhere off the coast first, to a place where fishing was good: large schools they could catch with great braided nets. I would barely lose sight of land, he told me, before we reached the opposite shore, where I could trade more of my farm-grown goods for wasteful fatuous things made of beads and brocade. The crewmen knew what they were doing – they had skills they'd known for years and years, as sons of Poseidon might. They had fished off of docks and out of rowboats since they were small.

(And so who was I to doubt them? I who had never so much as sifted smooth rocks from a stream or plucked snails from a path?)

I cast off with them, wearing a look they called lily-livered and my slacks that were covered in dirt, which is bad luck on the ocean. Bringing the land out onto the water is doltish, they said: upsets the sea the way bad milk upsets a ;stomach.

(I had also packed my fear alongside my comb and my spectacles in my suitcase.)

Having lived my whole life alongside humble homely creatures like myself (cows and chickens, goats and horses, beings that ate what I ate and breathed what I breathed, not slithering aqueous things who sucked down water through gills and could not blink), the rolling waves were foreign to me. I vomited up breakfasts and lunches, my stomach settling by dinnertime only to be upset again by rotgut rum. Nights I dreamed of rolling downhill and uphill again, by some manner of locomotion not my own.

The sailors made jabs. Avoided me.

They were superstitious and sometimes cruel – hermitic and crablike.

Though I would not have mocked them had they tried to take up a plow or a hoe, or milk a cow or birth a baby lamb, I understood their discomfort and so did not take their taunting to heart.

Half a week on the water led to nets filled to bursting with fish: globes of shining slivering blue and grey and sometimes yellow that I helped to haul in and dump into troughs. 

It was odd to see the creatures alive with all their scales; odder to see them so close to death.

The fish were harder to deal with after we caught them. They escaped between holes in the ropes in breathless dances across the decks, marking slippery paths where their salty scales touched the planking. Fish are lithe little filaments of the ocean that help it move and sway the way muscles move an arm. Seeing them in piles – in bundles, in lifeless heaps like coat sleeves – was hopelessness. These beings were dead. They would be absolved from their heads and cored of their bones like fruits being pitted, their scales removed like the hairs on a man's chin in the morning.

I do not know how many fish I gutted, how many heads I guillotined and how many silvercoin eyes I stared into before the storm came.

Every strike of lightning was the point of a harpoon. Thunderclaps were personal insults, hurled at me with malice by people I respected and who respected me: my brothers and my father and my wife; the barman and the innkeeper and the woman I bought pickles from. Forks of light hit the water and illuminated it in molten flashes like sheets of hot metal struck by a smith’s hammer.

During the storm the sailors asked nothing of me, knowing my lack of expertise with rigging and jibs and the fanatical skeleton of their precious wooden vessel could only bring sabotage. I stood useless on deck, a ghost, staring out at the open water being upbraided and ravaged by electricity and whales of clouds; I ducked below decks shouting the names of my wife and son and daughters, hoping the air from my lungs would propel us back to shore.

But Poseidon was angry, and Zeus was on his side: neither god wanted me on the water, knowing I belonged on land tending to beasts that roamed and beasts that grazed, beasts that fed from troughs. I had no business with things with scales or fins – this one majesty was not granted me; was not meant to be borrowed or lent.

When the ship was struck I was above decks again. In atonement for my embargo I needed to be visible to Sky and Sea: the sight of my face would convince the gods that I was not worth killing men over.

Lightning hit the mast, lit it like a candle. Fire hunkered downwards until it caught on the canvas of the sails, setting them alight and orange like the wings of a monarch. Copper and black they spread across the purpled horizon. (I can remember the heat – the blazing rush of fire on my cheeks, sweat pearling and sizzling away and pearling again.) My beard dampened and dried, dampened and dried; the salt from the water that had been hiding in my skin for days surfaced then in a rime of lacy white along my hairline and over my lip and in the conch-curves of my ears: islands on my skin.

The ship burned and burned. Men's clothes were set aflame and they ripped them away. But they were all tinder and did not know how to combat flame: they were men of a different element. They had never doused a burning barn or the spitting oil of a cooking fire.

To fill the lifeboats with ocean swill and haul it back up, bathe the sailors in it, pitch it back soupy with char – it was impossible. I knew there were stacks of barrels stored away belowdecks. As the ship continued to burn, perked ears and curling lips and whipping tails of flame, I tried to calculate how many barrels were water, how many were rum that would explode and turn the ship to a skeleton, blackened like corn stalks rotting in the ground. I ran belowdecks to the storeroom.

The smoke came with me – I coughed and coughed. Though the storm brought with it a onerous breeze, brackish and tangy and stoic, the pelting rain was enough to oppress the sheep's wool clouds of smoke, sending it into my lungs and eyes as gaseous gifts. Oak barrels and casks lined the walls of the hold, restrained by straps of leather. Many had broken free and were rolling about, lumbering. Some were labeled, black letters branded on. Others were not. The smaller ones were gunpowder. I kicked them into a corner.

I rushed to differentiate between usable barrels and dangerous ones using awe bit of chalk I found. (Os on the good, Xs on the bad – a tic-tac-toe of casks, turning the hold into a child's game in the midst of all the screaming and the smoke rolling down from the deck.)

The ship pitched hard to the right, then harder still to the left; I was thrown off balance. A barrel marked O toppled and burst on the floor and I was showered in bad wine, the red of it dyeing my trousers and the cuffs of my sleeves. Compared to the freezing seawater it felt tepid, dank; the musk of it pervaded the enclosed room and made me lightheaded. 

The ship was being rammed from both sides by the head of a giant sheep; in my head appeared the mad image of a bighorn, enormous and powerful, with a thick scaled tail – a fish's.

Another barrel fell and threatened to flatten me like a ground roller.

I was praying for my family and my own savior and the savior of the sailors above decks (I could still hear shouting and the crisp crackling of flame: the ship was surely blackened entire now; walking about across its deck would be like walking on live coals) when the cask was knocked away.

Wine exploded everywhere. When finished blinking it out of my eyes, the image from my mind of the ram with the back end of a fish come to life in my swollen vision.

Before me stood the beast, monolithic horns dripping and brow stained dark with wine. 

The barrel was smithereens: iron bands twisted to silver hair ribbons, bung rolling freely towards the corner where I had corralled the kegs of gunpowder. The wood had been reduced to splinters, ends frayed like the ends of unfinished scarves. I had seen containers of this same make dropped from heights of fifty feet or more and still yet holding together.

“I am Pricus,” the creature said. His voice was recalcitrant – a boom, refractory and overbearing in this tiny room. The echo his voice created muted everything. Even the rumbling thunder was coated by his words as though by a thick coat of varnish.

“This is my doing,” he said. It was stated as a fact, not an admittance. Pricus was the incarnation of Capricorn, an astrological sign come to life. Sent down from the sky, seething with ambition, foaming with wisdom, and now speaking with authority, harshness unbridled by compunction or scruple.

(I still have fear of him.)

“You know the reason for my cruelty,” he said, “and the reason for the suffering of your fellows.”

I ached; a piercing pain manifested in the hard space above my right ear, as though someone had taken hammer and nail to it like a tile to a roof.

“When a farmer tills the sea as he would the field, Pricus is summoned,” the creature, heedless of my pain, explained. “It is I who decides the punishment of the farmer attempting to plow and to furrow sacred salt water, and I who confers with the farmer in regards to his sin.”

The effrontery I had committed by haggling myself onto this ship, wishing to learn the secrets of sailors – how to rely on the wind for motion the way I did on rain for crops; how to search the waters for fish rather than the udders for milk – was suddenly obvious. I realized then that the seamen’s mockery was meant to drive me away. I realized then that they were truly afraid of me.

“I know now that it was a transgression for me to sail,” I said, meek.

“By law of the Astrologies it is treason to cross-pollinate between the elements,” Pricus boomed, rearing his horned head, flapping his enormous tail. The sound of burled dorsal fins colliding with planking was channeled into the thunder outside; the tossing of his head brought a flash to his eyes that was the sudden white-blue of lightning. I could do nothing but cower; I had just been condemned as a traitor and a disobeyer of Astrological law.

"I didn’t mean to offend.”

(My voice was the feeble rattling of a glass windowpane in a loose frame, a barn door loose on its hinges and swinging in a heavy wind.)

“Intention has very little to do with offense,” Pricus bellowed, though his face (ovine, slit-nostriled and the tallowy white color of old candle wax) remained unperturbed. “Neither does idiocy nor ignorance excuse you for your infringements.”

(Earthquake feet, loose axle wrists, I sat in the spreading pool of wine.)

“What can I do to atone?” For these accidental aggravations I knew I must pay penance. What could I pull from my pockets, from my boots, from my very body that would mean anything to him?

Salvation seemed distant as the stars themselves and I had an entire constellation here with me in the cabin. Who would save the sailors? Teeming heaps of krill or pods of dolphins listening hard for human distress as they squawked their aquatic parrot calls; schools of fish sympathetic to the human condition, pitying man for his clumsy legs and his lack of fins and gills? The last thing this ocean needs is more to haunt it.

“What is there,” I asked, “to be done?”

Pricus whinnied: the stunted chucker of goats with an amoebic watery rattle on the aft end, as though it had traveled all through his weird-woven body, incorporated both of his natures in one ambient sound. I could never return to the sea what I had robbed from it by setting sail with my farmer’s name and my farmer’s looks and my farmer’s past.

"I would strike you down," said Pricus. A flash of hope: there was some higher power out there – some astrological parade of mammoths – capable of deciding my fate. "However, as is mandate with the brothers and sisters of Astrology, I must offer you a choice.”

"A choice." My throat was a nest, my voice a baby bird poking its head out on a feeble, fragile neck, thin as straw, and veined; warbling. “What can I choose between?”

Cringing from my fate before it came down upon me was preemptive, foolish. I should have treasured my life in what remained of it, feel it more acutely than ever I had before, even if the only smells in my nose were burning and salt and sour wine; even if the only things I could see were the damp wooded underbelly of the ship, scabbed with urchins, and this creature come to life from the stars.

"You will be tested with choice. The decision you make will determine your outcome."

I nodded, and asked, "And my brothers?"

Pricus glared. I felt the heat of Gamme, Beta, Epsilon, Nu, Pi, Capricorn beating down upon me. Thousands of years of heat were contained in those eyes, and yet I told myself I had a chance. I told myself fables of survival.

"Your brothers are safe on land."

I shook my head.

(I should not have shaken my head.)

I said, "I meant my brothers above decks. The sailors, the captain, the first mate."

"Those men are lost," Pricus said, harshly. "The lightning and the fire and the sea have taken them."

The wine beneath my palms was cold.

"I can give them life again," he said. "I can right your wrong. I can save them.”

The waves were wasps against the hull.

“Or I can save you.”

What man would not think of his family in this moment? Of brown barley soup and dry linens; of fires not started by lightning but by coals? I am not ashamed that my son’s and daughters’ hands were the first to grip me, and not ashamed that I wanted to go back to them. 

It was the mark of a farmer’s soul that I felt their loss of me more than my loss of them.

The thunder gargled overhead.

All else: woolly silence.

I had put the sailors in danger. They feared me from the first: sheep spooked by a collie pup who wants only to play with them, knowing nothing of his fangs.

(I had known nothing of my fangs.)

Indecision as plain on my face as the wine on my shirt cuffs, the look I gave Pricus was begging. It was crumbled dirt.

I asked him, “Have you saved anyone before?”

“Thousands of times,” he said. “Thousands of times, but only a dozen lives.”

(The burning in his eyes had melted his voice.)

“My children abandoned me for the land – for sand and sunshine and dried-out seashells.

“Over and over I whirlpooled time and brought them back to me; over and over they left. They were pulled to the shore; they became unintelligent four-hooved creatures penned by wooden fences and they lost their power. Eventually I knew I could not save them any more – time evaporated like water each attempt I made. I conceded, and finally I am alone.

“Now I aim to save others – those compelled to abandon their station for want of another.”

“Did you hunt me down for that?”

(I need not have asked. Pricus was the eyes of every fish we hauled up in a net; Pricus was the crest of every wave and the sandy grit that covered the seaweed that lapped like dog tongues against our hull; Pricus was the clouds and the sky behind them. He was the god here. He was oceanic.)

“Choose.” Hoofing forward, standing over me. From his nostrils spumed an ewe’s-coat mist: salty, aquamarine. His forehead was broad and rectangular, furrowed like poorly-plowed land. “Whose savior will I be?”

Elements grappled in my head; the mixture of wood and wine under my fingertips confused me further.

I could not choose. 

Time passed, the ship sank and sank – a boot in sucking mud – and I could not choose. 

Seawater flooded the cabins like a bad smell. It froze me at first, but eventually, engulfed, it felt like warm sand, raked leaves. I moved and it moved with me, not around me.

I opened my eyes.

Seeing was looking through stained glass. The surface of the water, inverted ripples like knolls and dells; a horizonless distance stretched out navy blue before me. A keel was buoyed above; coral bearded the world below where sparrow-quick fish zipped and darted and eels and sea ribbons slithered and slouched from cranny to nook. I could breathe, but it hurt. My skull felt heavy, anchored on each side. My hands were squared flint. My legs were ultramarine and scaled.

The ocean is a strange place and strange things fill it.

It has been a hundred years.

I still have not made my decision.

Indecision has made me.