Life at Sea: Storms on the Atlantic

By Barry Pomeroy

Sam felt like he lived in an aquarium. Like he was circling eastern Canada waiting for a bored child to tap on the glass. Under such scrutiny, his plans were a temptation to the fates instead of a way to define his possible future. He tried to keep his hand firmly on the tiller, but sudden rocks under the hull, treacherous currents, or cross breezes, constantly seemed to shift his course.
He decided he would change that when he began to fix an abandoned wreck of a boat near the marina. Once it was seaworthy, he would be Joshua Slocum sailing around the world, and the adventures he would wrote in his cramped journal would expand until all the books in his village library could not contain his endless travels. Months later, when the boat was marginally closer to righting, he met Jennie and like a rogue wave she turned him from his intended course.
A beautiful, clumsy, bespectacled mermaid of a girl, she was a confusing combination of rippled water and waves thrown up by a storm. The touch of her body suggested a horizon that no amount of sailing could have revealed, and he felt like the curse he'd been under since the day he was born had been lifted. Every tack has a reef, and with his fears thumping against the solid planks of his reality, he worried he would be cast adrift again, his hull leaking and not a ship in sight. He gripped the tiller and kept an eye on the water's surface.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barry Pomeroy
• Release date: Apr 22, 2020
• ISBN: 9781987922820

Barry Pomeroy

Barry Pomeroy is a Canadian novelist, short story writer, academic, essayist, travel writer, and editor. He is primarily interested in science fiction, speculative science fiction, dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, although he has also written travelogues, poetry, book-length academic treatments, and more literary novels. His other interests range from astrophysics to materials science, from child-rearing to construction, from cognitive therapy to paleoanthropology.

Book preview

Life at Sea: Storms on the Atlantic

by

Barry Pomeroy

Sam felt like he lived in an aquarium. Like he was circling eastern Canada waiting for a bored child to tap on the glass. Under such scrutiny, his plans were a temptation to the fates instead of a way to define his possible future. He tried to keep his hand firmly on the tiller, but sudden rocks under the hull, treacherous currents, or cross breezes, constantly seemed to shift his course.

He decided he would change that when he began to fix an abandoned wreck of a boat near the marina. Once it was seaworthy, he would be Joshua Slocum sailing around the world, and the adventures he would wrote in his cramped journal would expand until all the books in his village library could not contain his endless travels. Months later, when the boat was marginally closer to righting, he met Jennie and like a rogue wave she turned him from his intended course.

A beautiful, clumsy, bespectacled mermaid of a girl, she was a confusing combination of rippled water and waves thrown up by a storm. The touch of her body suggested a horizon that no amount of sailing could have revealed, and he felt like the curse he’d been under since the day he was born had been lifted. Every tack has a reef, and with his fears thumping against the solid planks of his reality, he worried he would be cast adrift again, his hull leaking and not a ship in sight. He gripped the tiller and kept an eye on the water’s surface.

© 2020 by Barry Pomeroy

All rights reserved. Copyright under Berne Copyright Convention, Universal Copyright Convention, and Pan-American Copyright Convention. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the author, although people generally do what they please.

For more information about my books, go to barrypomeroy.com

ISBN 13: 978-1987922820

ISBN 10: 1987922824

Table of Contents

Chapter One ~ Cast Upon Strange Shores

Chapter Two ~ Starting the Debate

Chapter Three ~ Falling for Jennie

Chapter Four ~ A Declaration

Chapter Five ~ Boat Work

Chapter Six ~ Memorials

Chapter Seven ~ Falling in Love

Chapter Eight ~ Life at the Cottage

Chapter Nine ~ Canoe Trip

Chapter Ten ~ The Fallout from Dad's Visit

Chapter Eleven ~ The Last Day on the Shore

Chapter Twelve ~ The Shifting Sands

Chapter Thirteen ~ Finding Another Boat

Chapter Fourteen ~ Back on Dry Land

Chapter Fifteen ~ The Logic of a Dream

Chapter Sixteen ~ Adrift

Chapter One ~ Cast Upon Strange Shores

He had no memory of his mother’s womb, so he had to rely on family stories about his birth. Sometimes his mother said she almost died when he was born, and that he was saved by a doctor with quick hands and metal forceps, while his father mainly remembered having to make his own dinners for a week while she was in hospital.

Without access to the medical records, he would listen while they described whatever aspect of his birth they found the most useful at the moment, depending on what they were asking him to do. That meant he heard the stories out of order, and the versions contained information that was obscure, mundane, or anatomically suspect. The details surrounding his birth were scattered wood from a wreck, a sandy shore littered with a story impossible to reassemble.

I should have snapped your neck when you were born, his mother said more than once, accompanying the statement with a playful hand on the back of his neck and friendly squeeze. His father would talk about his nascent mastery of golf, and how he was about to move from simple putts to long shots above the entire green, but that had been interrupted by the late arrival of a baby when they’d already given up waiting.

The birth itself was difficult by all reports, but he was nearly sixteen when his father confessed that Sam owed his existence to chance. Although his father had momentarily returned to smoking, and the basement was redolent with cigarettes and the whiskey he spilled on the workbench, he was coherent enough to relate a story that was as improbable as it was evocative. The amniotic sac was a tangled mess of cords and appendages, according to his slurred story, and his mother had laboured well into her second day before a doctor came to work on Monday morning.

The decision was made abruptly, and according to his parents, without consulting them. His twin was unraveled so that he would have room in the birth canal. At the time he felt—in his teenage way—that such a birth explained why a part of him had always been missing, but as he grew older he wondered why his father would invent such a story.

His father’s tale hovered over and interrupted the earlier version, as though his twin had come to life with the telling and was now albatrossed around his neck. When he recreated the moment in his mind, he thought of both versions as true. He was born after twelve hours’ labour to loving parents attentive to his every need, and he was the result of an early fratricide. Although he couldn’t be blamed for his action, he’d wrestled away his brother’s life.

His mother had her own story. She talked about the eagerly awaited child, the room that had already been painted, and how she had proudly shown him around to the neighbours once she could bring him home. He’d been sickly, she admitted that, but she blamed his father’s parsimony. His father fancied he could trim more money off the oil bill every year, so he kept the house cold. By the time Sam was four his mother had taken over control of the heat; that meant that for the longest time Sam thought he was raised in the tropics of his bookish youth.

He knew nothing of his puling days, in which he crawled on the floor and put dirt in his mouth, and his parents were silent about those desperate times. His mother told him that his father had been let go from the warehouse and was seeking other work, and the stress of a newborn weighed on him. His father said that a real man wasn’t involved in childrearing and he’d spent his time in the pub. Reliant on such sparse memories, Sam used television to supplement his absent history.

He’d had a stuffed cat. He remembered a vision from a high window he presumed was a hospital, and he had a scar on his arm because he’d rolled down a flight of stairs when he was left unattended. How a solid infancy could be constructed from such fragments he didn’t know, but for all his effort to make his childhood become clear, he was left with just pieces of things.

He saw his own hand reach into a tidal pool for a hermit crab, and he either remembered or was told that he had tottered up to a complete stranger and told her he needed to pee. Television was a land of dreams, although those mostly had to do with Sesame Street puppets, and school work limited to his mother teaching him to write his name before he went to school.

He had only the vaguest recollection of his first days in school, the long line of yellow buses and the impossibility of finding his own. He remembered listening intently to instructions, determined to follow them to the letter so that he might be able to get back home. Although he didn’t realize it at the time, he was arbitrarily moved from class to class so that his teachers might balance out their load, a pawn in a mathematical game before he could even count. Although they’d told him he’d been given a rare opportunity to compare classrooms, he merely remembered new faces—by turns open and friendly and scowling and evil—that had to be negotiated in the first few days until he was moved again.

Always being the new kid in the class meant that he became friends with children who either had recently arrived or were about to leave, the rejects of the kid world. One boy, Jerry Eagle, was his friend for nearly a month. They met in the corner of the playground closest to the side of the school with no windows. It was out of sight of the teachers who monitored the monkey bars, who were competing for falling children. Everyone wanted to be the teacher who saved the child. Then they would be allowed inside and they could both get warm. Jerry was lonely too, and they both avoided Jim, who was always fighting and whose fists were honed by use into sharp knives. Another boy came with Jerry, but in Sam’s mind they was just the two of them, and when his father told him the story about his twin, for some reason he imagined Jerry.

They became friends because they had no one else, but also because they each were a line thrown into the whirlpool of primary school. When a man living beside the school went berserk because someone had thrown a rock into his back yard, Jerry stood by Sam and denied they were involved. Sam had thought of the rock as unnecessary ballast, and he never really considered what was on the other side of the fence, but somehow—perhaps because he was always moving—Jerry saw a few seconds into the future. For Sam, that future contained Jerry, and he would speak of their high school years as if the trades couldn’t help but blow them both in that direction.

Perhaps, Sam thought later, that growing attachment was what had driven Jerry away, for he wasn’t in school on the following Monday, nor the rest of the week, and when he asked his teacher they said his family had moved away. Sam went back to avoiding Jim on his own, and although he struck up other friendships—like when he let Walter throw his cereal box toy onto the roof—he was careful to keep himself apart.

In his various classrooms he sat apart, as though the space between him and the other children was decided by some value beyond mere metres. The distance suited him, and he learned how to placate his teachers more quickly than the other students. He’d had enough experience by grade three to know the teachers needed to believe they were the smartest in the room, and although he was a decade away from realizing why they needed such affirmation, he was adept at pretending. He would parrot their answers back to them, give them exactly what they wanted on the tests, and like the other students they liked, they would give him extra work to do for extra credit. He would lose a few minutes that he would have wasted anyway, but his marks in general went up even if his performance didn’t. He began to see the entire enterprise as a game, and he was learning to mimic the rules even as he refused to play by them.

There were other students who had figured out the system, but they didn’t accept him. His parents were a shade too working class, or didn’t bow before the pulpit enough to meet their stringent criteria. They never made their implicit judgement overt, but it became apparent when he was asked to join their groups for an assignment. They would assign him an exercise and then take the credit for themselves. He hadn’t learned yet how to deal with his peers, and just when he thought the teacher kids like John and Christina were about to accept him, he found out his parents were moving to Moncton.

In his mind he was following Jerry, but emotionally he felt as though he were instead diffusing, as though his selfhood was flaking off and disintegrating. If he’d heard his father’s unbelievable story about his twin at the time, he would have thought he was following him into oblivion. The differences between the city and the town he’d come from were clear at first. He saw women downtown in skirts that his father looked at and then quickly away, and he noticed his mother pursing her lips. They began to attend a catholic church and outside on Sunday he passed by a few panhandlers with their hands out. The bustle of traffic, the tall buildings downtown and the shows at the theater where his parents made him sit on his hands and be quiet, paled beside the orgy of evidence that the city was different than anything he’d ever experienced.

When he went to school, the differences became more apparent. The kids had an edge to them, and some of them were more brutal and cruel than Jim had ever been, with his playful punches in the hallway. More than one kid returned to class beaten and bloodied and the teachers averted their eyes. He began to look for tendrils of influence, the car dealer’s kid with the short hair and Jesus talk who smoked by the birch trees and tried to get girls to go with him into the woods. Somehow his depredations were ignored, while Len—his new school’s version of Jim—was strapped publically and humiliated by everyone from the principal on down. He watched with a line of other kids, on their way to the cafeteria, as the French teacher pounded Len’s head into the wall, shaking him back and forth while she berated him for not listening. He wanted to be someone who would stand up to her, who would put his own life on the line like Jerry had for him, but he looked on with the others, and when he got to the cafeteria he ate with the rest.

His initial dismay got him through grade four and five, but he began to wake early from dreams about running or falling when he thought about entering junior high. He needed a new strategy. The teachers were busy catering to those kids with connections, and his parents were new in town and his mother worked in a shoe store, his father in insurance. He couldn’t curry favour by being the good kid, for weaker students resented the nerds, as they called them. He entered his first day of junior high with a few hundred other kids from around the city, their walk belligerent with first impressions or timid with camouflage. He tried to run some middle line, pretending that his father hadn’t just dropped him off with the other parents, and that he was somehow indifferent to the sneers that were sent in his general direction.

In the end, the strategy came to him, for the school had organized a library tour for all the grade sixes, and although it was a thinly-veiled way for the teachers to postpone teaching for another few hours, Sam was entranced. He went back at lunch, and the kindly librarian, Karen, welcomed him as he tentatively entered the door.

You can sit over here, she told him, beckoning to a few chairs clustered around a low table, as if it were an imitation of a dentist office.

He went through the bookshelves, going first to the magazines meant for kids, and then—growing in confidence about his interests if not how he fit into the school—he began to read. The books were adventures at first, silver boxes found in oak trees after a storm which uncovered deadly plots, diamond-etched notes on windows which revealed hidden passages in old houses, hermits alone in the woods who recited Greek poetry and raised cats, but the adventuring soon turned to the sea. The more he read the more he realized he was born to breathe salt air and to walk a wooden deck. Far from the tumultuous classes where teachers ignored some behaviour and punished others, where Tom’s jackknife was merely for whittling while Sherry was sent home for cutting paper with scissors, Sam began to dream about going to sea.

His notion