Hiraeth (Journal Entry #2)
I know many Gods, but my father knew only one and he carried Him always in the form of a weather-worn book written in his home script that he kept tucked in the right breast of his coat wherever he might go.
The spine had split at Psalms years before I was born, where he read most often, and the front had been permanently warped from where he would lay it on his knee as he said Grace over whatever supper he’d managed to put together from scraps he could scarcely afford.
Father had come to America, to New York, as so many did, in a rickety old boat, though it was more of a waterlogged coffin than a ship. In his chase for a better life than the one he had left, he worked any factory job that would take him.
By the time the sun rose on the city he had traded twelve hours of labor for pennies that barely kept his ribs beneath the muscle.
Every night, he would come home and pray.
He met my mother a year later, in an early January snowstorm while he visited the pub for a warm drink. She had hid in a dark corner with a bottle cradled to her chest like an infant, but no less beautiful to him even as she drowned her senses away with absinthe.
Beautiful in the way that fire is beautiful. That is the way he had described her to me the many times I’d asked.
He was smitten and their courtship sewed itself together from stolen moments between factory shifts..
My father loved her deeply.
She loved the drink more.
You will have to forgive me for not being able to give a further account of their meeting. I only heard the story once or twice, and I do not remember the smaller details.
Their romance was brief.
The child came quickly, me of course, and with it the woman's temper quickened too.
It was March when her belly began to swell, and a cold, windstrung December when she left bruises on his face.
I was birthed into the world shortly after that night- a blessing to my father, though my mother thought my stomach a burden.
Father had been a mild-tempered man with a soft heart and forgiving soul and the stubborn type of love that made him ask if she had eaten yet even while quietly dabbing blood away the afternoon she split his lip with a frying pan. That forgiveness ran dry the second my mother turned her fists to me.
For 6 years my father endured the fights and the bottles and broken vows, until one night my mother’s knuckles found my frail cheek hard enough to knock a tooth loose.
Something broke in him that night- the illusion of love, or the desperate clinging to a life he wished he could have…
Whatever had snapped, before the sun had finished setting, my father had taken me from my mother and her drunken violence, and we found ourselves on the edge of the city of Baltimore in less than a week.
We left with little more than the clothes on our backs and we made our new home between a tannery and a butcher's shop.
The tannery stank a stomach-curdling stench of boiled hides and fat. I distinctly remember hearing the rats chewing through the walls that enclosed us each night, but it was home for the time being and we did not fear my mother's rage anymore, and so here between the wet harbor buildings is where we would make peace.
Just until father was able to save enough money for us to move somewhere more welcoming.
The butcher took pity on us and our filthy fish-oiled clothes enough to throw us whatever he couldn’t sell, so we never starved even if the meat had often soured a bit before we got it.
Every Sunday, if the foreman hadn’t stolen his pay, Father would take me down to the docks to fish and watch the ships that sailed in and out of the harbor.
One caught my eye that summer morning.
The cargo ship docked a mere 60 meters from us had been the largest seagoing boat I had ever seen, with containers as long as fallen trees and tall as the hovel we had lived in, with a running crew that spoke little English. A foreign scrawl had been stamped or burned on most of the boxes like runes. I couldn’t read any of it.
But I could not read English either, having been not allowed in the local schools, so perhaps I was innocent for my ignorance.
Even so, had I been a smart child I should’ve taken those as a sign to return to the safety of the docks.
Alas, I would continue onwards and, in my mischief, make a choice that would turn the wheel of my life.
How was I to know I was on the wrong boat? I thought surely that it was too big for a long sail. It was only going across the harbors and back!
I would never see this land again.
Nor my father.
Can be read on AO3 ( https://archiveofourown.org/works/80605756 )
