Salvaged by the Castaway

The crate had been in the rocks below his slip through three days of rain, and the thing curled inside it was still breathing. Walt Sorenson almost stepped past it.

His hip had gone stiff on the ladder, the Lorraine G was taking on more water than the pump liked, and he had four empty traps stacked in the stern to prove the morning had cost him more than it gave. A crate like that was trash, somebody’s cull box thrown off a boat. He nudged it with his boot to free it for the tide.

Then it scratched. Thin, dogged, a scrabble of something against wet pine, over and over, like it had decided long ago it would keep on even after it stopped mattering.

He crouched. The lid was nailed but the wood had swelled and split, and when he worked his knife into the crack and levered, it gave with a sound like a small bone. Inside, a seal pup no bigger than a bait bucket flinched from the grey light. Ribs like the tines of a rake under the fur. One rear flipper laid open, the meat of it torn and grimed. Two black eyes, wet, holding on him.

“Somebody didn’t want you either,” Walt said.

The gulls wheeled and complained. He knelt there in the rain longer than a sensible man would, water running off the brim of his cap and down his neck, and he told himself all the true things. That he couldn’t keep himself in coffee this month. That a torn-up seal was a job for the young ones up at the Coast Guard station with their clean trucks. That he’d buried a wife and closed a business and there wasn’t room in one old life for one more thing to fail at.

The pup scratched at the pine again.

He took off his coat and wrapped it, and the whole shivering weight of it fit in the crook of one arm, and it did not weigh anything at all.

Vernon down at the bait shed saw him carry it up the road and laughed until he coughed.

“Walt. You can’t feed yourself and now you’re running a hospital.”

“I’ll manage.”

“With what? You catch anything in three days?”

He hadn’t, and Vernon knew he hadn’t, and Walt said nothing and kept walking, which was its own kind of answer and both of them heard it.

He set the pup by the wood stove on a folded blanket. He had a bucket of herring meant, more or less, for his own supper, and he took one out and held it to the whiskered mouth and got nipped for his trouble and tried again. It ate four. He watched it eat four fish he’d have salted and stretched across two days, and he ran the numbers in his head, and then he stopped running them.

Each night he warmed a pan of salt water and cleaned the flipper with a rag, holding the little body still against his chest while it fought him. The wound closed grudging, then all at once. By the second week it was hauling itself across his floor in a loud, ungainly hurry to meet him at the door. By the third it followed him down the path to the shore, humping over the stones, and slid into the shallows and swam a tight, delighted circle and came back.

When he took the boat out it barked. A raw, honking racket that carried over the engine, that carried, Walt was fairly sure, all the way up to the station on the point where the young guardsmen must have wondered what in the world. And when he came back in the grey afternoon it was there on the flat rocks by the slip, up on its foreflippers, watching the mouth of the cove until it found his hull, and then it started that barking again.

His daughter Carol called on Sundays from up in Bangor. Dad, it’s not getting easier out there. There’s a room here. There’s a whole floor here, you’d have your own door. He said the water was fine. He said the boat was fine. He did not say that he’d taken in a seal because a seal was the one creature in Beal’s Cove that came around and asked nothing of him and could not, whatever else it did, look at him and see a burden. You could take help from a thing that didn’t know enough to pity you.

He named it nothing. Naming a thing was how you lost it.

The wildlife truck came on a bright cold morning in October, two people in fleece jackets and a rescue crew from the aquarium down the coast, and they were kind and they were right and Walt hated every minute of it.

“He’s healthy,” the young woman said, kneeling by the rocks, and the pup let her scratch under its chin the way it let no one but Walt. “That’s the whole win, sir. He’s ready. He needs his own kind. Up past the islands there’s a haul-out, a hundred of them. That’s where he belongs.”

“I know where he belongs.” His voice came out flatter than he meant. “Take him.”

They netted it gentle and lifted it, and it twisted around in the mesh to find him, and it cried. Not the barking. Something higher and worse, aimed at him, and it did not stop crying while they carried it up the beach, and Walt stood with his hands in his coat pockets and his jaw set and did not go after it, because going after it would have been a foolish thing and he had done his one foolish thing already this year.

“He’ll settle in fine,” the young woman called back. “They always do.”

“Sure,” Walt said. And under his breath, to the empty rocks: “Be forgot by tomorrow.”

He went inside and put the blanket by the stove out with the trash and washed the fish smell off the pan and sat a long time in a house that was, he told himself, exactly as quiet as it had always been.

Winter shut the cove down like a hand closing.

The groundfish went wherever they go. Ice built on the traps. Walt went out less and caught nothing when he did, and the Lorraine G sat at her mooring taking the weather, and he stopped going down to look at her because there was nothing to be done and looking only made it worse. He got thin. He’d always run thin; now his belt had a new hole in it he’d cut himself with the knife.

The sickness came on him in the last week of January, a scratch in the throat that by nightfall was a fire behind his eyes. He knew what a smart man did. A smart man got on the marine radio and raised the station and let them run him up to the clinic. A smart man called his daughter.

He banked the stove instead and got under two blankets and told himself it would break by morning. It didn’t break. The second day the room tilted when he stood, and the third day he didn’t stand, and somewhere in there the fire went to coals and then to grey ash, and the smoke stopped rising from the chimney of the little house on the cliff, and no one on the whole cold shore had any reason to look up and notice that it had.

He lay on the floor by the cold stove because he had gone to feed it and his legs had folded and the floor was where he’d ended. He could see the door. It was ten feet away and it might as well have been the mainland. He thought, with a calm that surprised him, that this was not a bad way to go. Quiet. Nobody driven out in the weather on his account. Carol wouldn’t get the phone call in the night; she’d get a slow silence and then somebody would come and it would already be finished and clean and no trouble to a living soul. He’d been so much trouble, one way and another. This, at least, he could do without asking anyone for one thing.

He closed his eyes and listened to the rain.

And then, under the rain, on the rocks below the window: a scratch. Thin. Dogged. A scrabble of something against wet stone, over and over.

Then barking.

He opened his eyes. It was the middle of the night and the wind was up and he could not have heard what he thought he heard, but it came again, that raw honking racket he would have known in his sleep, in his grave, closer now, right down under the cliff, thrown up at the house against the storm.

Walt got a hand on the leg of the stove and pulled. His arms had nothing in them. He got the other hand on the sill and dragged himself up the wall by inches until his face came level with the black glass, and he looked down through the rain at the flat rocks by the slip.

It was there. Grown huge, a full grey seal twice the size the pup had been, a pale rope of scar across one rear flipper, up on its foreflippers with its whole body pointed at his window, barking and barking into the wind like it had been doing it a long time and meant to do it a long while yet.

He put his hand flat on the cold glass.

He could give this up. That was one thing he could do. Lie back down on the floor where it was almost warm and let the quiet finish and be no burden and no trouble and no bother to anyone, ever, one last time.

Or he could make noise.

His whole life he had not made noise. He had gone down soft so no one would have to come.

The length of black pipe ran up the wall by the stove, carrying the flue’s heat along the chimney stones, and Walt let go of the sill and fell more than reached for it and got both hands around the cold iron. He hauled himself half up. And he swung the loose end back and cracked it against the chimney stone with everything he had left, which was almost nothing, and the ringing of it went through the house and through his teeth.

He hit it again. Again. Iron on stone, a hard flat clang that had no softness in it anywhere, that was the opposite of going down quiet. Clang, and clang, and clang, out into the storm, out over the water, a man in a dark house beating a pipe and asking, at last, for somebody to come.

The Coast Guard patrol had been working the shoreline in the small hours because of the barking. A grey seal carrying on that loud, that late, on a night like this, it wasn’t right, and a stranded animal was worth a slow pass with the spotlight. They’d found nothing on the beach. They were about to swing the boat back out when the wind dropped for half a breath and one of them held up a hand.

Iron. Ringing. Up on the cliff.

They followed the sound to the door, and when it didn’t open they took it off its hinges, and they found Walt Sorenson on his knees against the chimney with a length of pipe still in his hands.

They kept him at the station three days, then the clinic a week, warm and fed and furious about the fuss, and he lived. Carol drove down through the ice. He let her make the bed up and stock the shelf and he did not, this once, tell her to go home.

It was a young guardsman named Petey who mentioned it, weeks on, offhand, loading Walt’s groceries into the truck to run him back up the hill.

“That seal of yours.” Petey grinned. “You know it’s been out there since fall, right? Same stretch of rocks. Guys have been seeing it since October. Every day, more or less. Same spot.” He shrugged, cheerful, hefting a sack of flour. “Weirdest thing. Like it was waiting on something.”

Walt looked out at the water and didn’t say much. There wasn’t much to say that would fit in a truck cab.

He got the wood stove going that afternoon, and before he sat down to it he did a thing he had not done in years. He turned the marine radio on. Not to call anyone. Just to leave it on, the low crackle and mutter of the whole cove’s voices going back and forth, the boats and the station and the weather, a room that was no longer entirely quiet.

Carol called on Sunday.

“How’s it going down there, Dad? You getting on all right?”

He looked at the fire. Any other year he’d have said fine. Fine was the word he’d built the whole house of his life out of. It cost him something to set it down.

“It was a bad winter,” he said.

A pause on the line. “Yeah,” Carol said, softer. “Yeah, I know it was.”

“I’m all right now.”

That was all. He let her keep worrying a little, because it turned out she was allowed to, because that was a thing you could give a person and not only take.

At dusk he stood at the window with a mug going cold in his hand and watched the flat rocks by the slip. The tide was working in. The rain had quit and the sky over the islands had gone the color of a struck match, low and cold and going out. There was no seal on the rocks. There hadn’t been, most evenings, since he came home. Out where it belonged now, he expected, up past the islands with a hundred of its own kind, the way it should be.

He watched the empty rocks a while longer anyway. Then he went and switched on the light by the door, the one that threw a yellow square down the path to the water, and he left it burning, and he went back to the window to see.