Tales of Wonder (31 page)

And all the while the hundreds of people followed crying out his name: “Fisher of Souls! Fisher of Souls!”

With a great effort, he raised his hands for silence. And there fell upon the palace a silence as deep as any he had ever heard in a cave.

“I am here
in
answer to your one great need,” he said. “I have come
to
answer your one great need.” His hands felt along the throne's ornate sides, remembering on their own. Then, speaking to himself, the Soul Fisher said, “Once long ago—so long ago there are hardly any of you here who might remember it—this was my throne and I was your king. I tried to rule wisely. But whenever I made a judgment, not everyone was pleased. One ruling led to another, and again there were those who were not pleased. So I ran away from my throne and fled to the cave.” He sighed, his voice cracking. “It is a hard life, the cave,” he said, “but far easier than here. To answer one wish at a time, to solve one small problem at a time, to please each seeker without hurting another, is easier than trying to answer many.”

But no one was listening to the Soul Fisher. For no sooner had he begun to speak than the people broke the silence, too.

“I need,” shouted one woman.

She was jostled aside by another. “We need …” began a man.

Two women shoved him aside. “Listen to us, O Fisher of Souls,” they cried.

A small child ran up to the throne and pulled at his hand. “I need—” and was slapped away by a crone.

“One at a time,” the Soul Fisher begged.

But no one heard. The people jostled and shouted and pushed and shoved to get to him. They argued and wrangled and finally a sword was lifted.

No one noticed the Soul Fisher slipping away.

He walked slowly down the marble halls and out into the rent land. He walked past the broken houses and torn fields, past burned-out farmyards and gutted barns, until he came at last to the mouth of his cave. Sadly he looked around at the hills and valleys of his kingdom. Then he made a small fire and relit his torch.

Holding his torch in one hand, he descended the winding, slippery tunnel back to the center of the cave.

There in the sputtering light of the torch, he sat down on the cold rocks. He watched the blind fish swim back and forth. And he waited for the first stoppered bottle to arrive with a question.

He knew he would not have long to wait.

One Old Man, with Seals

The day was clear and sharp and fresh when I first heard the seals. They were crying, a symphony of calls. The bulls coughed a low bass. The pups had a mewing whimper, not unlike the cry of a human child. I heard them as I ran around the lighthouse, the slippery sands making my ritual laps more exercise than I needed, more than the doctor said a seventy-five-year-old woman should indulge in. Of course he didn't say it quite like that. Doctors never do. He said: “A woman of your age …” and left it for me to fill in the blanks. It was a physician's pathetically inept attempt at tact. Any lie told then would be mine, not his.

However, as much as doctors know about blood and bones, they never do probe the secret recesses of the heart. And my heart told me that I was still twenty-five. Well, forty-five, anyway. And I had my own methods of gray liberation.

I had bought a lighthouse, abandoned as unsafe and no longer viable by the Coast Guard. (Much as I had been by the county library system. One abandoned and no-longer-viable children's librarian, greatly weathered and worth one gold watch, no more.) I spent a good part of my savings renovating, building bookcases, and having a phone line brought in. And making sure the electricity would run my refrigerator, freezer, hi-fi, and TV set. I am a solitary, not a primitive, and my passion is the news. With in-town cable, I could have watched twenty-four hours a day. But in my lighthouse, news magazines and books of history took up the slack.

Used to a life of discipline and organization, I kept to a rigid schedule even though there was no one to impress with my dedication. But I always sang as I worked. As some obscure poet has written, “No faith can last that never sings.” Up at daylight, a light breakfast while watching the morning newscasters, commercials a perfect time to scan
Newsweek
or
Time
. Then off for my morning run. Three laps seemed just right to get lungs and heart working. Then back inside to read until my nephew called. He is a classics scholar at the university, and my favorite relative. I've marked him down in my will for all my books and subscriptions—and the lighthouse. The others will split the little bit of money I have left. Since I have been a collector of fine and rare history books for over fifty years, my nephew will be well off, though he doesn't know it yet.

The phone rings between ten and eleven every morning, and it is always Mike. He wants to be sure I'm still alive and kicking. The one time I had flu and was too sick to answer the phone, he was over like a shot in that funny lobster boat of his. I could hear him pounding up the stairs and shouting my name. He even had his friend, Dr. Lil Meyer, with him. A
real
doctor, he calls her, not his kind, “all letters and no learning.”

They gave me plenty of juice and spent several nights, though it meant sleeping on the floor for both of them. But they didn't seem to mind. And when I was well again, they took off in the lobster boat, waving madly and leaving a wake as broad as a city sidewalk.

For a doctor, Lil Meyer wasn't too bad. She seemed to know about the heart. She said to me—whispered so Mike wouldn't hear her—just before she left, “You're sounder than any seventy-five-year-old I've ever met, Aunt Lyssa. I don't know if it's the singing or the running or the news. But whatever it is, just keep doing it. And Mike and I will keep tabs on you.”

The day I heard the seals singing, I left off my laps and went investigating. It never does to leave a mystery unsolved at my age. Curiosity alone would keep me awake, and I need my sleep. Besides, I knew that the only singing done on these shores recently was my own. Seals never came here, hadn't for at least as long as I had owned the lighthouse. And according to the records, which the Coast Guard had neglected to collect when they condemned the place, leaving me with a week-long feast of old news, there hadn't been any seals for the last hundred years. Oh, there had been plenty else—wrecks and flotsam. Wrackweed wound around the detritus of civilization: Dixie cups, beer cans, pop bottles, and newsprint. And a small school of whales had beached themselves at the north tip of the beach in 1957 and had to be hauled off by an old whaling vessel, circa 1923, pressed into service. But no seals.

The lighthouse sits way out on a tip of land, some sixteen miles from town, and at high tide it is an island. There have been some minor skirmishes over calling it a wildlife preserve, but the closest the state has come to that has been to post some yellow signs that have weathered to the color of old mustard and are just as readable. The southeast shore is the milder shore, sheltered from the winds and battering tides. The little bay that runs between Lighthouse Point and the town of Tarryton-across-the-Bay, as the early maps have it, is always filled with pleasure boats. By half-May, the bigger yachts of the summer folk start to arrive, great white swans gliding serenely in while the smaller, colorful boats of the year-rounders squawk and gabble and gawk at them, darting about like so many squabbling mallards or grebes.

The singing of the seals came from the rougher northwest shore. So I headed that way, no longer jogging because it was a rocky run. If I slipped and fell, I might lie with a broken hip or arm for hours or days before Mike finally came out to find me.
If
he found me at all. So I picked my way carefully around the granite outcroppings.

I had only tried that northern route once or twice before. Even feeling twenty-five or forty-five, I found myself defeated by the amount of rock-climbing necessary to go the entire way. But I kept it up this time, because after five minutes the seal song had become louder, more melodic, compelling. And, too, an incredible smell had found its way into my nose.

I say
found
, because one of the sadder erosions of age has been a gradual loss of my sense of smell. Oh, really sharp odors eventually reach me, and I am still sensitive to the intense prickles of burned wood. But the subtle tracings of a good liqueur or the shadings of a wine's bouquet are beyond me. And recently, to my chagrin, I burned up my favorite teakettle because the whistle had failed and I didn't smell the metal melting until it was too late.

However, this must have been a powerful scent to have reached me out near the ocean, with the salt air blowing at ten miles an hour. Not a really strong wind, as coastal winds go, but strong enough.

And so I followed my ear—and my nose.

They led me around one last big rock, about the size of a small Minke whale. And it was then I saw the seals. They were bunched together and singing their snuffling hymns. Lying in their midst was an incredibly dirty bum, asleep and snoring.

I almost turned back then, but the old man let out a groan. Only then did it occur to me what a bizarre picture it was. Here was a bearded patriarch of the seals—for they were quite unafraid of him—obviously sleeping off a monumental drunk. In fact I had no idea where he had gotten and consumed his liquor, or how he had ever made it to that place, sixteen miles from the nearest town by land, and a long swim by sea. There was no boat to be seen. He lay as if dropped from above, one arm flung over a large bull seal which acted like a pup, snuggling close to him and pushing at his armpit with its nose.

At that I laughed out loud, and the seals, startled by the noise, fled down the shingle toward the sea, humping their way across the rocks and pebbly beach to safety in the waves. But the old man did not move.

It was then that I wondered if he were not drunk but rather injured, flung out of the sea by the tide, another bit of flotsam on my beach. So I walked closer.

The smell was stronger, and I realized it was not the seals I had been smelling. It was the old man. After years of dealing with children in libraries—from babies to young adults—I had learned to identify a variety of smells, from feces to vomit to pot. And though my sense of smell was almost defunct, my memory was not. But that old man smelled of none of the things I could easily recognize, or of anything the land had to offer. He smelled of seals and salt and water, like a wreck that had long lain on the bottom of the ocean suddenly uncovered by a freak storm. He smelled of age, incredible age. I could literally smell the centuries on him. If I was seventy-five, he had to be four—no, forty—times that. That was fanciful of me. Ridiculous. But it was my immediate and overwhelming thought.

I bent over him to see if I could spot an injury, something I might deal with reasonably. His gray-white, matted hair was thin and lay over his scalp like the scribbles of a mad artist. His beard was braided with seaweed, and shells lay entangled in the briary locks. His fingernails were encrusted with dirt. Even the line of his face were deeply etched with a greenish grime. But I saw no wounds.

His clothes were an archeological dig. Around his neck were the collars of at least twenty shirts. Obviously he put on one shirt and wore it until there was nothing left but the ring, then simply donned another. His trousers were a similar ragbag of colors and weaves, and only the weakness of waistbands had kept him from having accumulated a lifetime supply. He was barefoot. The nails on his toes were as yellow as jingle shells, and so long they curled over each toe like a sheath.

He moaned again, and I touched him on the shoulder, hoping to shake him awake. But when I touched him, his shoulder burst into flames. Truly. Little fingers of fire spiked my palm. Spontaneous combustion was something I had only read about: a heap of oily rags in a hot closet leading to fire. But his rags were not oily, and the weather was a brisk sixty-eight degrees, with a good wind blowing.

I leaped back and screamed, and he opened one eye.

The flames subsided, went out. He began to snore again.

The bull seals came out of the water and began a large, irregular circle around us. So I stood up and turned to face them.

“Shoo!” I said, taking off my watch cap. I wear it to keep my ears warm when I run. “Shoo!” Flapping the cap at them and stepping briskly forward, I challenged the bulls.

They broke circle and scattered, moving about a hundred feet away in that awkward shuffling gait they have on land. Then they turned and stared at me. The younger seals and the females remained in the water, a watchful bobbing.

I went back to the old man. “Come on,” I said. “I know you're awake now. Be sensible. Tell me if anything hurts or aches. I'll help you if you need help. And if not—I'll just go away.”

He opened the one eye again and cleared his throat. It sounded just like a bull seal's cough. But he said nothing.

I took a step closer and he opened his other eye. They were as blue as the ocean over white sand. Clear and clean, the only clean part of him.

I bent over to touch his shoulder again, and this time the material of his shirt began to smolder under my hand.

“That's a trick,” I said. “Or hypnotism. Enough of that.”

He smiled. And the smoldering ceased. Instead, his shoulder seemed to tumble under my hand, like waves, like torrents, like a full high tide. My hand and sleeve were suddenly wet; sloppily, thoroughly wet.

I clenched my teeth. Mike always said that New England spinsters are so full of righteous fortitude they might be mistaken for mules. And my forebears go back seven generations in Maine. Maybe I didn't understand what was happening, but that was no excuse for lack of discipline and not holding on. I held on.

The old man sighed.

Under my hand, the shoulder changed again, the material and then the flesh wriggling and humping. A tail came from somewhere under his armpit and wrapped quickly around my wrist.