Isabel Tutaine

Clams in Cold Water

When Moses settled on the coast of Cuba, he was already old, and his hair was white and frizzy like sea froth on rocks. Though he said he was a retired fisherman, as a child I imagined him a pirate for his arms were tattooed with those things the sea forbade men: white whales, treasure chests, mermaids, sunken islands.

On the island, he fell in love with an old, honey-colored waitress named Lila and within a month, she moved into his house. Though she continued serving ship builders by the docks, she never left Moses until years later when she was carried out in a coffin, dried and shriveled as an apricot, her jaundiced eyes opened to the sky because Moses refused to let anyone close them.

I still remember all the details of that day, even now, fifty years later. I was a boy then, about five, and all my questions were swift and unpretentious.

Moses respected that, and when I asked the question no one else dared ask, he answered me directly. “The eyes must stay open so the soul can leave the body and make its way to where it needs to go.”

“What happens to the soul at night? When the eyes are shut?” I asked.

“Ah . . . ” said Moses, and his voice sounded hollow and prophetic like the roar in seashells. “Then it becomes anxious and makes you dream.”

❖

Moses had an old brass telescope, as round and fat as a sugar cane but so highly polished I could see my reflection in it, drawn out into a thin line along its length. The telescope had a huge lens as smooth and translucent as a cat's eye and if I looked at it in just the right way, I could see green, maroon, and yellow nebulas.

During the day, Moses pointed the telescope toward the port, and he let me peer through the small end at the sailboats that were miles and miles away but seemed so close, I sometimes stretched my hand to see if I could touch the quivering sails. Moses always laughed a little when I drew back and was disappointed to still find myself in the room — sailboats like flies on a window screen.

“When the sky is black,” he said as if by way of invitation, “you can see the stars and if the moon chooses, you will see her too.”

“That far?” I gasped.

“Yes,” he answered. “It will pluck the stars from the sky and place them right against your eye.”

I decided to take up Moses on his invitation and after conniving, I convinced my mother to let me visit him at night. Then, with the patience of a stone, I waited and waited until there came a night, cool and clear, with an uncompromising sky onyx as onyx pierced with stars. On that night, I asked my mother if we could visit Moses.

He knew immediately why I had come. Without much ceremony, he offered my mother a seat and lead me to the telescope that in the moonlight looked more like a yellow, one-eyed bird than a scientific instrument.

I plugged my eye against the little lens and looked into the heavens. Oh, the stars! Not quite as close as sailboats, but oh, so close! And so brilliant! And the craters of the moon!

“It's magic!” I whispered. “It's magic!” But when I took my eye from the piece, I found myself in the room, and Moses stood beside me, grinning at my silliness.

“No — optics,” he said to me. 

And I, thinking optics was a form of magic, like sorcery or voodoo, wondered if people wore glass eyes so they could see the stars as clearly as I had.

After a while, Moses offered me the use of his other magnificent possession — a giant mahogany rocking chair. Its seat was as vast as the sea with a little wave carved into it, separating were two thighs should rest. From the seat rose twelve spindles, like apostles waiting for a meal. These formed the back from which extended two skeletal armrests. The chair did not look inviting, and the first time I sat in it, I rocked carefully, not quite knowing what to expect.

Moses, I knew, was perfectly comfortable in the rocker. He’d sit for hours, rocking back and forth, back and forth, as regularly as the pendulum of a clock.

“It is like being at sea,” he once told me. “Only at sea the waves rock everything, so that sometimes you can look into a cup and see the motions of the entire sea around you.”

❖

One morning, a bald man in plaid pants appeared at our door with Moses's rocker and telescope. Moses died, he informed us bluntly with that blank expression of people who are mourning. “And he said you should have these.” He pointed to the two articles on the porch, and added, “I am Moses's brother. He spoke of you often.”

My mother and I nodded wordlessly and respectfully, for neither one of us had ever considered that Moses had any relatives, except for the old woman named Lila whom he had taken as a wife. And I had never considered, not even remotely, the possibility that Moses would ever die. At that age, I half believed anyone who was my friend would live forever.

Numbly my mother and I accepted the telescope and the rocker and put them in the hallway in the back of the house, where we kept old magazines, my collection of seashells, and a miscellany of useless things. Then we closed our minds to the matter until we went to the funeral that evening.

At the services was Moses's brother, who to this day remains nameless in my mind. He had exchanged his plaid pants for a somber, ill-fitting black suit and tie. There was another man, who too remained nameless, though later we were told that he was Lila's brother, and a good friend of Moses. And then there was Moses, dressed in clothes I had never seen him wear and stretched out in the casket, his eyes as closed as two clams in cold water.

How could this be? Lila had been carried out of Moses's house, her eyes open and blank as if announcing nothing more could be for her and indeed, nothing more ever was. Yet here was Moses, eyes closed as if he had fallen asleep in his great mahogany rocker.

I sought out the undertaker and asked him if he could please open the old man's eyes. The undertaker, kind and patient, was no doubt used to coping with macabre curiosity. But he insisted that he could not open Moses's eyes; to do so was disrespectful.

“But how will his soul get out?” I cried, astonished at the undertaker’s ignorance.

I tried to explain, and the mortician looked at me as stupidly as a goose. A panic swelled within me as I realized that it was up to me to see that Mose’s eyes were opened so his soul could go where it needed to go. I insisted again, politely at first, then pigheadedly until the undertaker became annoyed. My mother conceded that perhaps I was too young to have come. By this time my panic had grown so greatly—that my Moses should be condemned to be restless forever—that I burst into tears.

Wanting to pacify me, Moses's nameless brother pulled me one side and whispered, “The soul knows its way around the body, child. It will escape through the ear.”

I looked at the man in horrid disbelief, and my fear flared. By the time my mother took me from the parlor, I was in hysterics, shouting that if we did not open his eyes, Moses would be forever plagued by dreams. 

Of course, I made sense to no one, and when we got home. I was given two swift slaps on the behind for being disrespectful and sent to bed. When I awoke the following morning, Moses had been buried, his remains politely marked with a grey stone.

For the next few weeks, Moses shadowed my thoughts. I thought of him when there was nothing to remind me of him — between bites of fruits and while waiting my turn at checkers. He crept into my most private thoughts and loomed. I tolerated silently, hoping that like a headache, he would go away of his own accord. I began to wonder if I would always be responsible for Moses’s discomfort in his afterlife.

Then one night, I began to hear: creak-creak, creak- creak, creak-creak. 

From my bed I could see the doorway to the hall and through the doorway, the shadow of the rocking chair against the wall. With each creak-creak, the shadow move ever so slightly, growing longer-shorter, longer-shorter.

I rose and went into the great hall, where I stood by the rocker as it placidly tilted back and forth. The telescope stood on its tripod like a caryatid, shrouded in the white curtains of the open window. I disentangled it and closed the window. Almost immediately the creaking stopped. When I turned, the rocker was still, the shadow of its spindles uniform against the wall, evenly spaced and slightly curved like the ribs of a whale.

I returned to bed invaded by a sense of failure. Moses had bequeathed to me his most precious possessions, and still I had let him be buried with his eyes closed.

I slept restlessly that night, and in the morning I awoke with an impertinent desire to become familiar with the sea. I took out my collection of shells from its various boxes and arranged them by shape and color. Then I mounted them on a pegboard with a pink starfish in the center.

My uncle, who had been at sea during his youth, took great pleasure in my interest, and showed up one day with an old sailor's cap. It was made of dark blue, moth bitten wool and had a stiff leather brim that was cracked. It acquired great value for me, having been told that it was an admiral's cap.

Yes, that was what I decided to be — an admiral with my very own fleet. And in preparation for this magnificent career, I began collecting picture books about ships, sailing, naval uniforms, seashells, fish. My mother insisted that if I was going to be a sailor, I should learn the names of all the seas and where they were on a globe so I would always know where I was.

Eventually the old hall transformed itself into a maritime museum of sorts. Everything having to do with sailing and the sea found a place in it: old coins, fossils, etchings, scraps of sail, even a powdery piece of wood my uncle claimed to be a fragment from the famous Maiden's Wealth, long sunk with its great bounty into the obscurity of the Indian ocean.

All of it was perfectly worthless, but who could convince me? My mother complained now and then. Once when I came in with an arm full of driftwood, I hear her say to my father, “Hector, he's been falling asleep with that cap on again.” My father reassured her absentmindedly that my fanaticism was a temporary condition of childhood.

But the sea invaded my mind the way it invaded the great hall, and soon I had dreams about sailing through pastel colored waves to a cavernous nautilus where Moses stood captive inside a jellyfish. I tried to free him, slashing the tentacles left and right until I awoke, quite safely tangled in bed sheets, but spooked to the bone. Feeling too old to call for my mother, I grabbed my pillow and rocked myself until I felt calm and almost asleep.

Then I began to hear it: creak-creak, creak-creak, creak-creak. In the doorway of the great hall I saw the shadow of the spindles stretch to new lengths and spread along the wall like waves upon sand.

I rose to look for an open window and found none. The curtains were calm against the panes. The telescope sat dully on the tripod, its lens cloudy and unfocused like the eye of a dead fish. Only the rocker moved, patiently and gracefully, as if it knew that like the sea, it could move forever and not go anywhere.

Cautiously I pressed my fingers against its arm. It came to a full stop like someone interrupted in mid-sentence. I took my hand from the cool wood and watched. Nothing. Stillness.

Well, I proposed to myself, the floor is warped. That is all. But as I turned to leave, I saw the telescope pivot and follow my movement to the doorway. The dullness of its lens dissolved and in its place was something intelligent and poised like the pupil of a teacher's eye.

The mount is loose, that is all, I told myself. And the light is playing on the lens. The mount is loose. Tomorrow I shall ask my father to fix it. The mount is loose; the mount is loose; I chanted until I was again in bed, whereupon the shadow of the rocker resumed its rhythmic elongations until the shadows faded in the morning sunlight.

After that night, my sleep was never whole again. My mother consulted with the family doctor: I was sleepwalking. She had found me asleep on the floor in the back hall. My dreams were violent. I had no appetite. I did nothing but collect memories of the sea: jigsaw puzzles of Japanese waves, articles about schooners, cracked scuba masks, corals with sharp, jagged edges.

“Hector,” my mother complained, “he tried to sleep in the yellow fishing boots.”

“He is a boy, Mama,” my father would say. “Let him have some fun. He will only be a boy once. Next week, he will start collecting dinosaurs.”

Out of some strange sense of penitence, I slunk each night into the clutter of the great hall to think of Moses. I hid among the boxes to avoid the telescope that gyrated slowly on its tripod, its intelligent lens searching the room. Sometimes if it spotted me, it pulled itself to its full length and scrutinize me as I had scrutinized the stars. By now the rocker had learned to rock silently, having found and balanced itself on the few floorboards that did not creak.

I forced sleep upon myself, though it was broken with dreams of a vast an unrevealing sea, all very subtle yet consuming. Moses now rose from the sea and came to me whispering solemn things, but his voice was unintelligible like the coarse murmuring of waves. I'd listen carefully to catch his words as he wallowed through the turbulent waters toward me, and as the backward surge of the sea pulled him into its depths away from me. Forward he'd come, and backward the waves pulled him. I could not understand what he was saying to me.

The sound of the ocean grew louder and louder until I realized a great tempest was rising in the hall. Though the windows were shuttered tight, the curtains swelled and thrashed and whipped the walls. Old books fluttered by like windswept seagulls and maps plastered themselves against the walls.

Without warning the telescope lost its cautious swivel and leapt into mid-air, twirling like a baton all about the room until it crashed against the wall of mounted seashells. With a great ring of brass, its lens shattered into a million stars, each dangerously bright and sharp.

Then, as if on cue, the rocking chair began rocking violently. From one end of its curved feet to the other, it rolled, tilting precariously each way, until it somersaulted into the air, rockers over seat. Gathering force, it spun down the length of the hall — faster and faster like a great propeller, swifter and swifter, until it hit the far wall—and shattered into a thousand splinters.

At this I snapped awake, wide-eyed and unnerved. I bolted upright to find myself on the floor of the hall behind a large box. I listened to the mechanisms of my body: the rushing in my ears, the thudding in my chest, a little gurgle from my stomach. I sat for a long time, engulfed in the enormous and peculiar tranquility of the night that seemed so disconnected to the violence in my dreams.

The stillness of the rocking chair and the nonchalance of the telescope did not seem real. The dense stillness of the night gather first around me and then within me like a black hole in my center. In that hole was the answer to my misery, I realized that night.

“Oh, Moses,” I whispered, acknowledging for the first time ever that I had wanted to open his eyes, not to release his soul, but to tempt it back into his body.