This is the first installment of a longer piece of fiction that feels like its time has come.
Epilogue
November
I The ninth month of the year, before the Julians changed the calendar, promoting their household, claiming the glories of high summer for their own: Julius, Augustus…. November, ninth month, one could call it “term.” II A welcome arrival, when development leads to fruition and fruition leads to birth. November, ninth month, pushed ahead. Relegated to the Fall-of-the-year, to that time when the glow of fulfillment has faded and the eventual closing-in and collapse of abundance starts to bite in earnest. A time of lack. III No light, no warmth, no harvest; but frost and a cold, silvery moon. To the Julians it was clear they were claiming a high point for their age. They understood. After them would come a reckoning, a Fall, an Autumn. IV This Autumn of ours caught us by surprise. This was not what we expected. No matter what signs and portents. Not so much…. No matter; but we have grown so accustomed to looking ahead; ever faster, ever farther. And always seeing, reflected in that deceiving mirror, only what we want to see. V Visions of Augustan triumphs following each Julian consolidation of power. The results compound like the figures in our ledgers endlessly reaching for the impossible and seemingly getting there. No wonder we did not see what we were forging, hidden inside our dreams, the only possible result of all our striving. VI November. Ninth month. Too late to mistake a mild afternoon for the return of harvest’s bounty. Even as things get hotter, we experience so much of this, as a descent into winter. VII Desert people would have a more apt image perhaps, for when the brief, cool and moisture of a precocious Spring withers into a blazing dry and barren summer. VIII We enter this tale in November. We do not know where it leads. We can only be certain it does not lead back to anything we would recognize. IX It is only after some far-off new Spring has accommodated with the ravages of this long, dead season that it can ever again become clear how this particular dark harvest, this slim chance of any regrowth, was necessary. X That it could have been arrived at in no other way. From here, all we can see is what has been lost, what continues to be at risk. All vectors head away from any possible promise. XI November. Ninth month. We do have practice at this sort of thing. We have often had to negotiate a time when good-news was scarce. When there were no signs of hope. XII A good thing. We have always needed some way to adjust our proclivity to settle into expectations and wallow in the sterile seductions of maximizing our imagined delights at the expense of our real treasure. XIII Even now, this November upon us, it is dawning clarity that we are more alive in this time of contraction than in the queasy midst of heady surfeit and undemanding ease which brought us here. XIV We find our strength, instead of looking for some advantage. We find each other, and in so doing, recognize what we’ve been so sorely lacking; what drove the manias that brought us here. November. Ninth month, no longer.
Epigraph:
“The Artist is no other than he who unlearns what he has learned, in order to know himself.”
e.e. cummings
“a time … when something awful is happening to a civilization, when it ceases to produce poets, and, what is even more crucial, when it ceases in any way whatever to believe in the report that only the poets can make. …”
“The crime of which you discover slowly you are guilty is not so much that you are aware, which is bad enough, but that other people see that you are and cannot bear to watch it, because it testifies to the fact that they are not. You are bearing witness helplessly to something which everybody knows and nobody wants to face.”
James Baldwin
Chapter One,
Coasting
“What do you think?” Arthur’s smile almost a grimace. His jaw set. A faint gleam in his eyes. He stands back-to-the-wind. Hands deep in his pockets, fists clenched. His eyes turn slightly to acknowledge his companion. This gesture, a sign of their long years together.
What do I think? Arthur takes the question in and lets his mind wander, waiting to see what might swim into view. He turns to face the wind. Raking light cuts under the bill of his cap, burrowing into his eyes. The meager warmth of a late Autumn sun lights low clouds, shining silver-white; lined up in rows, reflecting cold tones of blue-and-green off the sea. It all barely registers. Scanning the far horizon for signs. Signs of wind and current. Signs of land, shoals. Over-falls: where an ebbing tide meets wind-driven seas, As dangerous as a reef….
The other kind of threat, vessels, Friend or foe? Approach? Run? Calculating, always calculating ways to maintain maneuvering room, A chance for victory or escape.
Secure that others keep watch he looks inward, drawing on a mental map of his surroundings. Perkins leaves Arthur’s side to scan his quadrant of the horizon, He’ll answer in due time.
Avalon courses, broad-reaching under working sail, heeling to the weight of a cold steady wind from the Northwest. Sailing on a line with the setting sun poised above a dark band of cloud straight ahead, right on their bow. Dazzled, they peer into its full force. Can’t afford to wait for it to fall behind the clouds, The watch must be kept.
A low-lying island lies at the limit of their sight. A shard of stillness rising from the sea beneath a wall of clouds rimming the wide dome of sky, well to the south.
Don’t choose, decide. These words come to him, That feels right. Not sure how it applies…. An honest answer, for now….
Around him, the routine of dusk at sea is carried out quietly. More than a set of ingrained habits. They approach their tasks with reverence.
Young Jim feels the rudder tremble. Its vibrations travel through the long, slender tiller. Its wood alive in his hand, warm to the touch, flexing and easing. An intermediary, this lever between his strength and the power of wind and wave. His eyes orbit between the dimly lit binnacle and the dark sails that blot out brilliant starlight above and ahead.
Cara stands just to windward. They’ve shared this midnight watch for months. Slowly, patiently, persistently, she takes in their surroundings. Not only with her eyes, listening and feeling the vibrations and motions of the vessel through her feet.
Their gazes meet. They smile. Hours pass. The only change is the slow procession of stars overhead and the toss of waves and the rush of their wake. There’s no other sense of Avalon’s progress through the night.
On their long trade-wind passage a steady Northeast wind has taken them west across the ocean. After weeks coasting north, and then northeast, the warmth of tropic seas has been left far behind. The advancing season has outpaced them on this jog back to the South. Each day is colder than the last.
Orion rises earlier each night. A stretch of protracted calm promises more sparkling sunny days. They hope it holds; but know in their bones that mild weather always leads to another storm this time of year, The third clear night in a row.
Arthur pulls himself up through the forepeak hatch and gently settles its lid back into place. He suspects Cara knows he’s here, Nothing gets by her. Lulled by broad undulations their bow wave’s glow traces a line across. It takes time for him to register his unease, Something missing…. He swivels his head, taking in the bowsprit jutting forward between the knight-heads, looking aft along the sweep of the leeward rail, The forward lookout?
“Oh,…” He remembers, Abby’s injured. Do without a forward lookout on calm, quiet nights. Better than piling another chore onto the rest. Been enough of that. Three bunks cradle convalescing crew. He’d rather think of them as injured. Instead of the more accurate, wounded.
I’ve held onto a belief in justice for so long. He laughs, When did I become an outlaw?
That very beautiful. It's another uncanny connection as well in many ways. The poem and the story are both beautifuil.
Really beautiful.