ORCADIA by Timothy Irish Watt

I

My father, whoever he is, what the word denotes, what the figure within it fails to entail, my father had a father who threw him over the hedge. Grandpa. A prick, a war-hero, and an orphan sort-of. His father – grandpa’s father – was a Presbyterian missionary who died of malaria in Bengal just after his son, my grandpa, was born. Grandpa’s mother was diagnosed hysterical two years later and was put away for a long time, in a white room, where she died. I have never known her name, nor ever seen a picture of her face, nor held a hairbrush, for example, that she cherished before becoming – as the diagnosis tells us – hysterical, or that she cherished more while she was hysterical and medicated and dying in her distant room. She is no more. Her son, my grandfather, favored vests.

He was sent away to boarding school by his aunts when he was seven years old. The second grade. Be a good boy, grandpa. He became a B-24 bomber pilot in World War II. He was nineteen. He led a squadron over the Ploesti oil fields. He came back alive, so to speak. He was an orphan in charge of a plane, roaring out above the world, to bomb Hitler and Hitler’s minions and Hitler’s supplies into oblivion. He was a great pilot, highly decorated, my father’s father, dad’s dad. And grandpa’s father was a missionary, and his father was a shining kind success, and his father was the first American of us all. His name was Peter. He left the Orkney Islands, and the difficult windblown whiskey-driven fisherman’s life of his father when he was fifteen. He apprenticed himself to an architect in Edinburgh, and five years later he sailed for America, a suitcase in his hand, a cap on his head, a mint in his mouth.

Apparently his eyes didn’t blink in the wind. He must have gotten this gift, if it was a gift, from his father, the Nameless Orcadian, hauling nets in a storm. His island was Stronsay – a rock in the North Sea. I have been to the tavern there where he drank. It was a rubble of dark stone with a ribbon and the cellophane wrapper of a cigarette package embedded in the dirt I assume was once the tavern floor, across which my great-great-great-great grandfather walked, in his cracked boots, moving towards the fire with a drink in his hand.

I went to Stronsay with my father, who I did not know very well, the summer after I graduated from Hobart College, with academic and athletic honors, and prepared to begin graduate school at Brown University the coming fall. I was, as far as I knew, very successful again, as perhaps I had not quite been since I’d left Lancaster for Andover eight years before.

The trip to Stronsay was my father’s idea, his plan, his graduation gift to me, his son, of whom he was said to be very proud, to return as father and son to the ancestral homeland, which he spoke of reverentially both when he first offered the trip and in the months leading up to the vague precarious sort-of togetherness of our departure from Newark, three weeks after my graduation, and four weeks after we – meaning the 1993 Hobart lacrosse team, of which I was co-captain – had won a National Championship in front of fifteen thousand spectators on the campus of the University of Maryland. Among the spectators at that event were my mother and step-father, and my father, who had in earnest reentered my life my senior year at Andover, where I was a terrible student, a good lacrosse player, and a first-rate socializer with nowhere to go to college because I’d failed to furnish more than my first choice (the University of Pennsylvania, which rejected me) and the back-up to which I would only have gone at gunpoint, with applications. It was then that my dad stepped in and suggested Hobart, his alma mater, which had recruited me heavily and which I had just as heavily ignored. Because of my father – the irony cripples my smile – I thus ended up going to Hobart, where I played lacrosse, and began to see my father again, most often on the sidelines, standing alone, and later, meaning my junior and senior years, talking with a broad smile on his face at the post-game parties in our team’s honor. I was his crutch, if he needed a crutch, and I was his friend, if he needed a friend, and I was his son, the captain. It never once occurred to me to decline his invitation, neither in my heart, nor in my mind. So together we went, father and son, to Stronsay, the Orkney Islands, Scotland.

It was July when we arrived. The wind wouldn’t let up and the weather changed and changed and changed again, and because Stronsay stood at fifty-nine degrees latitude, the sky never became night-dark, but hovered in a four-hour splendor of dusk. My father was afraid to drink. My father drank, but the drinking did not dispel the bewilderment in his eyes, nor the disorientation of his tongue. Sober, drunk, somewhere in between, it did not matter, he could barely speak. The first thing he said to me was, Do you understand them, by which he meant our greeting party – Stonsay’s harbormaster, a strapping indecipherable goof, and his mute and troubled son who had the look of a chronic masturbator temporarily held up between sessions.

I did not understand them at first, and I could not interpret sufficiently to turn confusion into heritage, to which he and I, son and father reconciled, had re-arrived, across time, bearing our name intact.

We’re just saying hello, I said. The harbormaster shook my hand. The harbormaster’s son shook my hand.

The woman – the wife, the mother, the daughter, and perhaps she was a sister too – was somewhere in the crumbling stone building behind us. The building was in the town. The town was stones and buildings bunched by the road across from the pier. The town was said to have electricity. The inn was said to have a TV. The island was said to have three-hundred and twenty-nine inhabitants.

In five days there, I saw eight. The first was the harbormaster, who was also the innkeeper, the constable, the postal clerk, and an eccentric companion to his pet crow, named Crow, who’d been with him through bad times and good, for near upon seventeen years. His name was Chimney, as far as I could tell, although it may have been Jimmy. He was the first person we met and the last we said goodbye to. There was also his son, the chronic masturbator, who was also the barkeep and the assistant harbormaster, and who could, according to his father, fill in as constable, in a pinch. What he meant by a pinch, what could possibly constitute a pinch on the island of Stronsay I had no idea, but I understand that aberrant behavior can be relied upon to show up everywhere, including Stronsay, if not especially Stronsay, which was said to have three-hundred and twenty-nine inhabitants.

The first three I saw were the harbormaster, his son, and his wife, introduced as The Missus and never known by us beyond that name. She was a whiskey-soaked stretch of indestructible leather, an unyielding accomplice to her cigarette, and she fried us whole fish and eggs in the morning and appeared to me to have no use for language, given her circumstance, on the island of Stronsay, living twenty feet from the sea in the ruined village, now lovely perhaps only to outsiders, excluding my father, who was confused, ashamed, and terribly disappointed. I said to him, His name’s Chimney, Dad.

Jimmy?

Chimney, I said.

His son made us cheese sandwiches in the bar in the afternoon. The bar served cheese sandwiches, McEwan’s, and whiskey. There was a dartboard, and a single dart stuck into the wall beside it. Three generic mail-order tables with four chairs each, and the bar itself, also mail-order, also laminate. The two windows of the bar, one on each side of the door, offered views of the port and the sea it was part of. The port was across what was called the road from the bar and the inn. What was called the road was seven feet wide.

I enjoyed eating my cheese sandwich in the bar, and drinking my McEwan’s, and looking out the window at the rain, if it was raining, which it did with a kind of sporadic regularity. I enjoyed gazing at the harbor – two boats and a pier – and at the small island called Papa Stronsay across the harbor, and at the sea and the sky beyond it.

My dad didn’t like it. He was ashamed and disappointed, disoriented and without time. The sun would not go away; the wind would not stop. Stronsay was not what he’d hoped it would be. And the rain continued falling with a kind of disordering order, a majestic disarray, from the sky that did not become dark in accordance with my father’s expectations.

My dad did not want to drink. My dad drank, in the bar that depressed him, and his tongue went wordless, and his eyes went blank, and his body numbed. I watched this. It happened – simply, progressively, successfully: There. He was there, then, far away from the inhabitants of Stronsay and Stronsay’s two guests.

On the second day he stayed in his room until very late in the afternoon, claiming fatigue. He said to me, It never became night. In that sentence was another sentence that said, it just wouldn’t, it just wouldn’t. He was in bed and the curtains were drawn. I shut the door. I began to miss him. He was my dad, in a dark room alone, confused and hurt and with no ability to understand his situation, and no other response to his ancestral land – that’s his phrase – than humiliation and sadness and pain. To miss him, then as now, and as I had so many times before, was another way of missing myself as his son, his responsive, enjoyable, worthwhile, and saving son.

I walked the road in the late afternoon, out of the village of Whitehall, away from the port and into the island. It was said to be seven miles long and I’d decided to walk it. Darkness, since it did not fully come, was not a concern, nor was the threat of an angry crowd, appearing suddenly over the crest of the hill, with axes in their hands and the intention to repay the sins of my father, and his father and his father and his father for abandoning the island, and his father – the Nameless Orcadian – for letting him leave, by visiting them back upon the son who was walking on the road of Stronsay as if he had a right to, as if he had a right to return with his diluted blood – Dutch, for fuck’s sake, Irish, English – and his sweater made by a sweathouse stranger.

It was said my father snored so loud he woke The Missus from her admirable stupor and sent the harbormaster upstairs, with his crow, Crow, perched on his shoulder, to make sure the door to my dad’s room was shut – it was shut – and if it was not shut, to shut it with as much parental discretion as any action around a sleeping human being requires everywhere for everyone on Earth, including my father, on the island of Stronsay.

A man puttered past me in a green Peugeot. He had a turban on his head. He was Pakistani, I guessed. He waved. I waved. He drove down the road and around the curve that led into the village of Whitehall, and the inn there, where my father was sleeping, on a bed between a window and a door. Unreasonably I began to fear for my father. Who was that man in the Peugeot, and what was he doing on the island of Stronsay? He’d no doubt reached the harbor by now, parked beside the inn, emerged, and whatever it was he’d planned to do was already transpiring as I stood stupidly in the rain on the road, dreaming my separate dreams, forgetting my father, walking ahead, with each finger of my left hand tapping my thumb; pinky to thumb one, ring finger to thumb two, middle finger to thumb three, forefinger to thumb four. I had seen four of the three-hundred and twenty-nine inhabitants. It was our second day on the island. The rain came down and went away, spattered, spit, poured forth in a torrential burst, merely fell, and now and again the sun appeared suddenly in the sky between passing clouds. And the wind was never anything less than a gust, always blowing, with unforeseeable fleeting rooms of stillness hidden inside it. When I found myself in one of these rooms I would be surprised by the silence there, and then the wind would gust again, pressing against me and the beautiful roar of it filled my ears. I pressed back. I kept on walking the road of Stronsay, the island without trees, from which my father’s name and mine had sprung.

It was said, and Chimney believed it was possible, that among the inhabitants of the island, there was a Watt, the last remaining Watt of Stronsay, who’d been born and raised in the house the Nameless Orcadian had built long ago when he wasn’t out fishing or sitting by the fire in the tavern, in his cracked boots, with a drink in his hand. I wondered, while I was walking the road, if I would run into the last Watt, and if I did, if I would know without introduction who it was, blood of my blood, blood before mine, bent in the field, a spade in his hand. I wondered – I wanted – this: To pass by the house and know physically that it was the house in which the people with my name before me were born and lived. I was hoping for the deja vu, the kind that whispers the fictions of time past, present, and yet to come in one’s ears, and leaves one wondering if one is alive or dead, living or dying, as who, when.

Houses were scarce, none seemed inhabited, all were built of stone and crumbling in their plot of rocky field. I considered approaching a window and peering in, if there was a window, or knocking on the door, if there was a door to be knocked upon, a home to be entered, a person to be met, a ruin to be explored, an emptiness to ask for forgiveness, an artifact to hold in my hands.

The road curved down and around and continued on by the sea, and I stepped off of it and made my way down slippery rocks to the whitest beach I have ever seen. As far as I could tell, there wasn’t a footprint on it, and for a while I stood on the last rock wondering if I should step on the beach or return to the road and keep quiet and glad about what I had seen. It was then I saw the head of a seal in the cove. I stepped onto the beach. It was indisputably lovely, and miraculously white, and when I stepped I stopped, and felt my right foot sink slightly into the sand, making its impression, and then I stepped and stopped again and felt my left foot sink slightly into the sand, making its impression. Then I stepped again and stopped and looked again for the seal in the cove and saw that there were two.

It appeared that they were watching me, now and again, until they grew bored, until they were curious, two seals swimming in a sea cold enough to kill me, around a rock that appeared like a stone throne fixed on the horizon forever. I stepped again, and stopped, and turned around to view the footprints I’d made in a circumstance of unforeseen and sublime vulnerability. There were three footprints, right, left, and right again, each about a half-inch deep and crisply drawn at the edges. When rain came, in a sudden burst, I watched the footprints fade. First the raindrops fell, one by one, darkening the sand with spots. Then the spots accrued and bled into each other. Then the rain fell more heavily and the spots disappeared and the footprints disappeared also and then the beach was wet and dark. Then just as the rain had come, the rain stopped and the sun appeared. And the sea was dark blue and swelling and iron-gray and swaying and capping whitely and settling and rising again, and the wind gusted across the surface of the water and the water sprayed upward and was driven downwind and disappeared into air. I stepped towards the water again; I watched the seals who swam in the cove.

Who was my father? My father was my dad.

It was said he snored so loud he woke The Missus from her unremitting stupor. She was a woman. Somewhere she had a name that was more or less hers, hidden in the airless pantry, in the high cabinet, behind a stack of plates, like a bottle of Beefeater’s. Memory upon memory, hand upon fist, pulling up the plumb-line to nowhere, coiling the rope on the pier in the rain, bent and concentrated, in cracked boots, a pipe in the mouth, a fire burning in the tavern, in the village of Whitehall, where my dad was sleeping because of “fatigue,” it never became night, these people are crazy, The Missus had whiskey on her breath at seven in the morning and it just wouldn’t become night, it just wouldn’t become night.

My father drank. It did not go very well, but it was not going very well for him before he drank either. His tongue was sometimes like his father’s – sharp and ironic and sometimes uninterpretable – and sometimes it was sporadic, timid, awkward, unsure, as it was on the island of Stronsay, where he took his son.

I wore the oilskin coat my mother had given me because she loved me. It had handwarmer pockets lined with flannel. My hands were in them. I watched the seals swim closer in. They disappeared behind the stone throne, and reappeared by an outcropping rock no more than fifteen feet from the shore. I inched closer, they disappeared underwater again, they reappeared at the other end of the cove. Above them, red-throated divers rose to hover in the wind and then they dove into the sea. They brought a smile to my face. All of them, the seals and the birds. I was in the wind with my hands warm and my eyes blinking and tearing and seeing and seen, on the island that was said to have three-hundred and twenty-nine inhabitants.

The fifth was the woman I met on the beach. A golden retriever followed in her wake. I did not see them at first. For me they simply appeared, at the other end of the beach. The dog bounded down to the water and bounced up and down on his front legs, and splashed water and barked at the seals, who were much like him, and the woman laughed, and the seals barked back and disappeared underwater. They reappeared at the rock again, near to the shore, close to me, where I was sitting, in my oilskin coat, with my hands warm. Hello seals, I said to the seals. I saw their eyes. One seal barked. The other seal barked. I wanted to touch them, and be touched by them. Together they disappeared underwater, and the next time I saw them they were very far out, beyond the throne; I could just make out the small forms of their heads bobbing buoylike upon the water, and I admired the ease with which they swam in the sea, and from my perspective, the courage and the happiness with which they did it.

Then they disappeared underwater and I did not see them again. Sea upon skin, skin upon flesh. The woman was near and her dog bounded up to me, where I was sitting. I held out my hands. He sniffed them and found me friendly. I scratched his ears and rubbed his head and he sat down beside me and lowered his head against my chest. When the woman came up behind him, he raised his head and looked back at her. Approval and consensus passed between them. He rested his head against my chest again. I was happy he liked me and trusted me and for a moment I wondered – or perhaps dreamed, he was listening to my heart, ta-tum, ta-tum, within me, and heard it and had sympathy. The woman stood behind him in a wool cap and an oilskin coat much if not exactly like mine. I felt I belonged. Cheers, she said.

Cheers, I said. I don’t know if I’d ever said cheers to anyone before. It came out right enough, as far as I could tell.

Visiting? she asked.

With my dad, I said. We’re staying at the inn.

I looked down at the crown of the dog’s head, and scratched his ears a bit more vigorously, which he seemed to like, from the muted groans he made against my chest, and I tried to come up with something more to say. I was surprised, despite the dog, that I had not stood and introduced myself and offered my hand. But it didn’t seem necessary. The introduction, the first friendly recognition, had happened as soon as she and her dog had stepped on the beach, appearing, I don’t know from where, it did not matter.

You too? I asked.

Visiting? she asked. No.

The wind gusted all around us and the light changed and shifted, and settled upon water, upon rock, upon land, and became muted by the edge of a drifting cloud, and momentarily disappeared and the sky became darker and cool and as elegant and fine as light, and light reappeared, shifting already, transfiguring itself and all surfaces it fell upon and the moon and the thinking of those who watched it and watched it again.

I would have spent a very long time near her smile.

We visited first, she said. We came back. We live here now.

Wow, I said. That’s great. So it’s just you, and . . . I gestured with my chin to the dog.

Max, she said, and my husband, Tom. We came up from London two years ago, July. It’s a lovely place, isn’t it?

Pride – this was where my father’s family and his father’s family was from – I felt a sudden surge and warmth of pride. It is, I said. Incredible, I said. I love it here.

I didn’t know if I did generally, but in that moment, I was certain I did.

Our family comes from here, I said.

That’s wonderful, she said. Is your father enjoying himself?

Very much, I said, eagerly and quickly. It’s been great for him, I added, to return.

Max lifted his head and licked me once on the chin, and glanced back at the woman whose name I had not yet been given. When Max stood, I stood. I wiped the back of my coat with my hands and wiped my hands on my corduroys, saw my boots and the sand upon them, saw the sea and the sea beyond it, and stood straight. Max was between us, quieter now, his nose wet and twitching, his eyes surveying the sea for the reappearance of the seals. The wind gusted across the water. And the possibility of touching this woman, of reaching out with a tentative hand, and tracing with my finger the faint wrinkle that ran from the corner of her eye and over her cheek when she smiled, as she was smiling, where she was, on the beach with a stranger, and the possibility of being touched by her, of closing my eyes, in a pocket of stillness and silence surrounded by wind, of waiting in a world of endlessly shifting light, to be touched by a hand extended gently forth from the atmospheric melee of the world itself, and then feeling her fingertip trace along the length of my left eyebrow, and fall lightly and pause upon the bridge of my nose, and then tracing along the length of my right eyebrow, for no other reason than that she was alive and loving and she’d come upon a stranger, a young man, sitting on the beach somewhere in the vicinity of her home.

I realized that we would separate as we had come together, without knowing each other’s names, but knowing something of the sea and the sky and the wind. And Max sensed it all, and the experience – Max’s experience – of us and of the sea and the sky and the wind would overwhelm one, as human, as being, on a beach, of an island, of an island in the sea, of a sea in the ocean and the ocean in itself, and a planet near enough to its sun, and a moon near enough to its planet. We were standing close, indirectly, respectfully, each to each, as two sides of a triangle running from the sea to a point somewhere far beyond us. She smelled of lilacs and salt, and the oil of her coat, and her eyes were so blue, and her face, beneath the wool cap on her head, was quiet and fine and genuine in its telling, and what passed between us, what wordless lyrical physically whispering consensus passed between us, remains.

Well, she said. Are we ready, Max?

Max bounded up and down on his legs and glanced with his deep excitable eyes from her to me, from me to her, and back again, and back again.

It was nice meeting you, I said.

It was nice meeting you, she said.

The question of names arose, flickered between us, and was gone. I smiled at her. She smiled back.

Here we go then, she said to Max. We’re off.

And they were.

Then I watched the footprints they made in the sand as they crossed the beach and climbed nimbly up the slippery rocks and onto the road. They crossed the road. They entered the field and climbed the hill. I watched them until they crested the rise and disappeared from sight, my eyes, and the limits of how and how far and what they could see.

This was the second day on the island of Stronsay where I’d come with my father, my stranger, my ghost, my kin, who was alone in a room with a watercolor of the harbor hung on the wall. The curtains were drawn. The window was shut. The door was shut. I missed my father. I had been looking for him my entire life. We had come here together, flawed and confused and incomplete, with words seeped up into consciousness, considered, trembling, and decided against, first on the flight from New York to Glasgow, then on the train north from Glasgow to Inverness, then on the train north from Inverness to Thurso, where in a small lamp-lit tea-room with yellow-painted walls and smart white trim, I watched my father drink tea for the first time in my life, and I noticed that his hands were small and suited to the teacup perfectly. I wondered what life would have looked like to me, what I might have looked like to myself, had he not left long ago, disappeared, reappeared sporadically, moved away, inched closer, came on, invariably faded again, from the time I was four to the precarious present tense of this trip we were on together.

We drank our tea in the village of Thurso. Rain drizzled down to the street outside, to the swept sidewalks, to the cars parked in orderly fashion along the curb, to the flower boxes painted red and blue and yellow and green, and to the slate roofs of the houses, which were a gently curving row, a façade of façades, each with its distinct address and distinct door, and distinct windows through which, here and there, could be glimpsed the post of a bed, a mantel, a chair, a table with books piled high upon it, and light, through which a man passed, in a corduroy coat, was fleetingly framed with a book in his hand, and then moved off down the hallway to a room at the back of the house.

Thurso was a small town, with diminutive proportions, at the northernmost edge of the mainland, on a hill above the sea. It was there my father and I had sat by the fire in low, short-backed, comfortable armchairs with a round wooden table between us, and with the whole trip to come before us. The table was a few inches shorter than the arms of the chair, and my dad, reaching easily for his teacup and his scone, remarked on it. This is just great, he said. He smiled broadly and brought the teacup to his lips and when he had taken a sip his eyes closed and he said mmm, and returned the teacup to its saucer and took up another bit of scone. The scones were delicious, the size of sand dollars, and a half-inch thick. They were warm and moist and flaked to the touch.

You can’t get ’em like this back home, I said. It was not the way I usually spoke, but what the words suggested was a genuine sentiment.

Hey, my dad said. He was animate and relaxed. He was my father, my stranger, my friend. You know what, he said. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a scone before today.

They’re the best scones I’ve ever had, I said.

We lifted the tea and sipped and gazed into the fire and felt our feet warm.

I don’t know who my father was. He was my dad. He kept our itinerary and our family tree – his words – in a folder marked “Watt.” On the family tree he circled my name, drew a line back to his, circled his name. On the itinerary he’d highlighted Stronsay, underlined it twice with black pen, and written something beneath it I could not decipher. He couldn’t either.

I can’t read my own handwriting, he’d said, chuckling. How about that?

This was on the plane from New York. He’d laid the itinerary on his tray-table, and the family tree on my tray-table, and pointed to the names. The flight attendant brought my dad a coke. My dad took it without looking up.

I said, thank you.

My dad nodded. He was my father. He was him for whom I feared. He was him whom I could not protect. His father had mocked him while his mother sat shit-drunk in the kitchen, remembering nothing, if she could, including the crashing sound of her husband who was a war-hero decorated fourteen times – the Bronze Star, the Silver Star, the Distinguished Service Cross, etcetera. He was nineteen, he was heroic, he was my father’s father, my dad’s dad. He was an orphan. And his great-grandfather was the first American of us all. His name was Peter and he boarded the boat to America with a suitcase in his hand. And his father stood at the end of the pier, dreaming, if he dreamed, and mourning, if he mourned, and looking, if he looked, from his place on the island to all the places his son was going, beyond his protection, out of sight of his father, the Nameless Orcadian hauling nets in a storm. And who was his father? His father was his dad, and the island was Stronsay where the harbormaster’s son stood listlessly drunk at the end of the pier with his hands at his sides, and there was the mail-order bar with a dart in the wall.

He’d thrown it nights before perhaps – the harbormaster’s son – after wiping down the tables of crumbs and fingerprints that might one day be there when an American father and son arrived on the ferry from Kirkwall with packs on their backs, and caps on their heads, and mints in their mouths, and romance, and resemblance, and expectations. And his father, the harbormaster, greeted them as if he was the friendly green king of the island, launching wittily into introductions and proclamations with his thick indecipherable accent, as if it could never have occurred to him that the visitors could not possibly understand him, or, as if it had precisely occurred to him. The American man said to his American son, do you understand him? As if they didn’t understand English.

I understood: The sea is not a word, homes become ruins, ruins become stones at the edge of a field, and the sins of the fathers are the sins of the sons.

I was my father’s son, and the roar filled my ears. My father didn’t want to drink. He didn’t drink. Then he drank. He drank in his room at night when all the doors were closed. And if dark does not come and if wind does not rest – the dark did not come, the wind did not rest – then whether he drank or did not drink, whether he was dying inside or not dying inside, bewildered with a body numb from a panic of living and its corrosion of nerves, a vacated figure in a circumstance of terrible vulnerability – is to say that he was my father and I was his son, his aftermath, his friend. And on the island of Stronsay, as I had my whole life, I loved my dad and sometimes I hated him, and most often I did not know how I felt beyond a wordless intensity of feeling. And the ghost – whatever it was – kept sweeping its fingers beneath my father’s eyelids. And I had not lived with nor been with him enough to know that this ghost was implacable and always recurring. My dad became a bitter hieroglyph glowing in my chest, a body breathing and heaving and at rest, and a voice – I saw it – numbed by trespass and words cauterized too deeply in wounds to ever come forth as testimony. In him there was no silence commensurate with sunlight, but a wordless denial and a deathless density of grief, and longing.

My father was a banker. His father was the war-hero, and after that, a failure in a vest. His father was the Presbyterian missionary. His father was the president of the Watt and Shand Department Store. And his father was the first American of us all. And his father is the Nameless Orcadian crossing the field at night in a storm. And his father, or his father, may have looked back with bitterness or relief or longing on a time when his father and his father’s father were at home in the world and the world knew them by name and the names were spoken. And long before that, a son found himself to be a father on a small unprotected island in the sea, and he felt the small anonymous dying inside him, and he wondered where he was and why. And in his heart perhaps he blamed his father for leaving what was known. And maybe this one had the last glimmer of Africa in him; a far-hauled flicker of a past beyond the stories told. And there was a father before him, and a father before him who might have lived when the land was sheared and drifted and became an island. And there was a father before him, and the progenitive and original moment in which he crossed the land-bridge and stepped upon the land for the first time, as the first man, and there was a father before him, who saw the land for the first time, and there was a father before him who dreamed that it would be there, in a time beyond the reach of dreams dreamed now, by a son whose father was a son, and his father a son before him. Wind upon wind upon wind upon wind, from the first unseeable matriculating instance in time apparent only as darkness, to now and its nostalgia delivered by longing; we longed for each other, for the relationship formed by a father and a son, for a place in the continuum we could think of as ours and ourselves in it as native and commiserating and known and included because of our blood and the longstanding genetic imprint of having come from another who came from another. And life was only all that was, as it was, a shining trauma, on Stronsay, in Thurso, at home, and without it.

II

I rose when it seemed time to rise, lifted my corduroys from the back of the chair, stepped into them a leg at a time, pulled them up, zippered the zipper, buttoned the button, cinched my belt, withstood a moment of hate for my body, and bent to retrieve my shirt and sweater from the floor where I’d dropped them the night before. I sat on the edge of the bed and pulled on my boots. Apparently I was a man in the world. It was time for breakfast in the dining room of the inn on the island of Stronsay. Scrambled eggs and dry toast and a whole fish, fried in its skin, head intact, fins adhering, tail splayed past the edge of the plate, and the single lifeless shining eye stopped fatally into a skybound stare of shock.

Do you knock on your father’s door in the morning, or do you wait for him to knock on yours? If I knocked on the door, anxiety would come to flood the bones of my face, and the backs of my eyes, and when the door opened, if the door opened, a failure to confidently greet my father would require me to avert my eyes, and disguise that aversion as a poetic affinity for floors. If I were Plato I would have spared nothing, disposed of everything, including my body – I would never willfully dispose of my body – and become a culmination of understanding unto myself, faintly ironic and remotely playful before the door to the room my father could not sleep in.

The crow cawed. It was in the den, without supervision. The Missus was in the kitchen. The hallway was narrow. When one stood in it, one stood between versions of light and dark, between the sea on one side, seen through the windows of the bedrooms and the fields and furrows and stones of the island on the other, and of the thinnest peripheral glimpse of whiteness – the sand – and silver – the sea – again, in the distance.

Between the doorways of the den and the bedroom hung a white-framed watercolor of the sea. Between the doorways of my father’s bedroom and my own hung a white-framed watercolor of the harbor of Whitehall at the turn of the century, clogged with boats, and the pier, equally clogged, by figures of fishmongers and wives and mothers, and children scurrying recklessly in caps – the sky spit rain and was cloudless in the corners – and the children were scolded lightly for scurrying, and in that light scolding were urged to scurry again, rain and shine, between fish-cutters in rubber aprons, and wives in plain dresses and rubber boots and heavyweight sweaters, and a wife – the captain’s perhaps – in bodice and skirts, parasol and pearls, ribboned hat and remarkable gloves cruel with whiteness from fingertips to elbows like porcelain hinges set between linen and silk, and a dark-skinned man – an Indian or Arab – standing alone at the edge of the pier whose planks were scrubbed clean in the morning by nameless women who could stay bent for a decade and then in a pure and songless moment stand to pluck the laundry from its line.

My father did not knock on my door.

I did not knock on his door.

I listened to him in the room beside me, on the other side of the wall we shared. First I heard the soft treading known only as the sound of a creaking floor – a sigh – a yawn – the sound of a belt buckle clamoring against itself as the pants the belt belonged to were lifted from the floor. Then I heard the whistling creak of his faucet turned and water splashing into the sink, and the sound of splashing brought to a stop by the whistling creak of the faucet again. I heard my father. I imagined my father through the wall we shared. He stood at the sink, shaving his face or combing his hair, or brushing his teeth, or averting his eyes from the reflection in the mirror, or staring it down.

And the sea eroded the stone into monument, and the wind smoothed the Old Man at Hoy’s countenance into a timebound almost infinite expression of silence. I assumed my father, who I could not see, stood in front of the sink. He might have been slandering his reflection with a force of articulation known only to himself; he may have turned the faucet on to weep under its cover of sound. When the water stopped running, the soft tread came again – six steps to the meeting of mattress and boxspring, a whine sent traveling down its spiral spring by the weight of a mattress filled with down. He sat on the bed. When he stood, I heard the mattress-whine again, this time traveling up the spiral spring to surface and settle unburdened as the distant lighthouse forbearance and quiet of a bed. I don’t know what else I expected to gain from this listening except to hear my father in the morning. Maybe he listened for me as well, and asked himself if he’d arrived at the age past waiting, behind a door, for the door to be knocked upon. And the Old Man at Hoy saw if he looked, two men, more or less alike, in the inn, on the island of Stronsay north of his brow.

There was too much in the world to be received with five open senses, always sensing, without rest save for oblivion – five versions of any moment in time, times all their many calculations – the feel of a footstep heard by the ears encouraged by the sight of the floor knelt to and touched and touched again as the tongue tasted the damp salt air in the room and a flake of paint gave way from the ceiling and drooped and held leaf-like and imminent in time. No sharp relief availed the eyes to obvious contrast – morning, afternoon, evening, night, ordered around one as standing stones around their god-like periapt. If it didn’t become night, it didn’t become morning. And I might have listened mutely in a room for years, failing to hear, or hearing only what my body felt, had I not known that breakfast was being served in the room off the kitchen. Rain, in torrents, fell. And the flake of the paint on the ceiling fell also and dropped feather-like without a sound. I was on the bed still, listening for a spring-loaded doorknob turned to the left, and for the door itself to finally open.

You have to know when to go, I said to myself.

I didn’t move. The woman I’d met on the beach the day before shimmered in my consciousness as the long-held memory of a singular encounter.

If I were Plato perhaps I would have perceived in terms of identity and variety; I would have plucked moments to identify in isolation, in terms of variety, and pondered variety in terms of the soul, and seen each gossamer thread of each physical reality spoking and spiraling and rising upward into the realm of forms, beyond poetry, where love reigned without bodies.

I was merely myself. My feet were on the floor. My father’s feet were on the floor. The faucet turned again. The water ran again. I had not heard my father cross his floor to the sink again. He was a man alone in a room. As Chimney was, in time, as Kenny was, and Plato was, and I was.

And the wind swept smooth the countenance of the Old Man at Hoy who stood in the firth with the severe forbearance of the sun at its station, and the sun shined down on the firth and its legendary caprice, its enormous basin-sloshing endlessness, and Chimney’s voice, from the foot of the stairs, called us to breakfast. I opened my door. My father was already in the hall, hitching his belt while gazing out the window to the low broad green of the island and the sand in the distance, and the sky above it. It was morning because breakfast was served. We stood in the hall. My dad turned. He said, it didn’t become night.

Kind of amazing, isn’t it? I said. We gazed out the window.

Was it? He said. OK. I guess it was, wasn’t it?

I touched the window. I felt the floor. A floor is a floor abroad or home, there or Orkney. Walls constituted houses and houses are homes with roofs to protect us from the weather and its effects, and erosion is for stones and coastland and not for homes in the time of one’s living.

Should we head down? I asked. We stood side by side, gazing out the windows still, our backs to the rooms we’d slept in and failed to sleep in.

Let’s eat, my dad said.

We descended the stairs to the first story and the room off the kitchen and the table in the room where Chimney sat examining his fork and his son sat beside him examining his father examining his fork. The Missus in the kitchen lifted the last fish from the pan and slid it on to the plate to be served with scrambled eggs and dry toast and fried potatoes made by her also.

A glass of porter stood at the tip of each fork as if it were the only drink that had, since the beginning of time, been served with breakfast. There was the breakfast table, there was the food, there was the porter, fair enough, it was morning, and everyone knew it, my father included.

Morning, he said as we came into the room.

Cheers, I offered.

The Missus appeared in the kitchen doorway, with a small wicker basket filled with individual packets of butter and jam.

Cheers, I said.

Morning, ma’am, my father said.

I don’t know what he intended by the word, ma’am, derision or respect, or irony or protection or playfulness or recognition. Maybe he didn’t know what he intended either, unless it was he’d simply slipped from a sleepless night to the schoolboy charm of his long ago youth used at his friend’s house for the sake of receiving a decent meal. Chimney placed his fork down.

Sit, sit, he exclaimed, gesturing to the open chairs. Kenny gestured vaguely in echo, saying nothing. It was then my father saw the meal. A beer in the morning above a fish fried whole in its skin in the morning, head complete, fins adhered, tail splayed past the edge of the plate? Its single eye stared up at him, my dad, who wanted food and had never skinned a fish in his life nor brought fork and knife to bear upon a fish’s head, alive or dead.

Breakfast! Chimney exclaimed, when we were seated in the chairs. The Missus makes a hearty breakfast, you see?

The Missus told us to begin.

Wonderful, I said.

Beer? My dad said.

I lifted my glass and drank.

Cheers! Chimney said.

He lifted his glass above the table. He sat to my father’s left. The Missus sat to my father’s right. Framed in the window behind my father’s head, a seagull held steady, slipped back in the wind, held again, dove taut-winged to the corner of the frame, and was gone. I sat to the right of The Missus. Looking at no one, she took a drink of her beer and placed it back on the table. Then the son, Kenny, lifted his glass in the direction of his dad’s, with a kind of deadweight and perhaps accusatory lethargy, and held it there.

Cheers to you, Chimney said to my dad. And to you, he said to me. We lifted our glasses also.

Quietly, behind my eyes, as if my mind was a refuge, I thought, and thinking remembered the beach on which I’d walked and would again, either with my father or without him, in the oilskin coat my mother had given me. And time sheared and drifted into a proliferate and nearly infinite lace of moments – a garment made of wind – and almost stopped.

And cheers to us all! Chimney said.

The men drank. The Missus drank when our glasses were down. Looking at nobody, she drank. The room fell wordless, and remained deafeningly so. Could the breakfast go on in silence forever?

Kenny said, Please pass the jam.

The Missus drained her glass.

I skinned my fish, and forked a bite, and began to eat with as much rigor and ravishment as I could contrive for a fish on a chipped plate, until – I ordered myself to the task – all that remained on the plate was the fish skin, folded neatly for The Missus to clean.

My dad had not yet touched his fish. Chimney had finished his. Kenny sat beside me in a spectacle of awkward gloom, or simple politeness, or a humor singing inside him as a commentary from an unbroken wit upon the meaning of tourists, and their far-off America, represented by the son beside him, and the father across from the son who needed to decide what to do with his fish.

The Missus glimpsed once at my dad’s plate, while he tried to catch a glimpse of mine. I was nearly finished. Chimney said, a lovely meal, Missus, Another lovely meal.

Yes, thank you, I said.

You’re welcome, she said.

And how do you find the breakfast, Mr. Watt? Chimney asked. To your liking, I hope.

My father stared at his plate. He sprinkled salt on his potatoes and eggs, and when he looked up he realized that a question had been asked, and that it had been asked of him, if only because of the faintly heard Mr. Watt, an utterance from an accent he felt as a boundary, or because of the weight of silence, and the fact of his plate . . . or because of his son, and my unacknowledged catalogue of payback disguised as fidelity? Is this how I was to him then?

This will to admittance – my corrupt career – turning sense into observation and observations into elegies, what is it in terms of the corners of my heart? In a room off the kitchen, was it me with my tricks and me with my sorrow and me with my seeing and blindness and habitual flight – high drama – between superiority and inferiority, between desolation and grace, searching for a father to forgive and abandon, and find on my swaggering and angelic own; maybe I was myth-adorned, a silver-tongued flaw of ambivalence mistaken for a sacred heart? Was it my father I loved, or his absence?

Chimney said, Mr. Watt and Mr. Watt, it would be a very fine day for a driving tour of the island. Would you agree Kenny?

I would agree, Kenny said.

Mr. Watt?

Neither of us answered at first. My dad appeared to be in mourning, which perhaps he was. As for me, I was simply insufficiently responsive to the sound of the family name.

Mr. Watt?

Chimney tried again, perhaps intending this Mr. Watt for the second Mr. Watt in his midst, which as logic has it, could only have been my father or me. Thus compelled, I answered in the affirmative.

Great, I said.

Excuse me, my father said, and left, or more precisely, in slow-motion fled the room.

We met him a few minutes later in the yard out back, where he stood squinting into the falling shed – windblown, roof-sunken and surrounded at the foundation by a panic of weeds. This shed served as Chimney’s garage. Headlights unlit squinted out animal-like from a lightless hole. On overturned traps beside him, Crow perched. The sky was gray for the length of the thought, and then it was bright, and then gray again and the wind arose and blew across the island. Crow ruffled his feathers, cawed once over no rooftops, and hopped to the halfwall beside the traps to perch again. Hi, Crow, my dad said.

How my dad had known to be there, in the yard, near the shed, where Chimney’s vehicle waited, was beyond my reckoning, and perhaps Chimney’s. But there he was, as if he was doing no more than waiting at the 86th St. stop for the bus he’d taken across the park to work for four hundred years. He leaned and squinted, absolute and commitedly, into the shed. Chimney stood just outside it. Kenny and I, the next detritus, stood vaguely together.

That’s a Morris Mini in there, my dad said, if I’m not mistaken.

This kind of unexpected locution, charming in its way and soaked in irony or loneliness or both, I understood as symptomatic of words urged out from mania.

It is indeed, Chimney said.

The four of us, father and son and father son, stood in the yard in the bright and gray beside Crow who hopped between traps and suddenly rose, wheeling abruptly out and up, and just as abruptly, descending in the wind again to perch on the roof where a weathervane might once have turned.

I believe . . . Chimney started to say.

Mini! my dad exclaimed, a Morris Freaking Mini!

You have it right, Mr. Watt, Chimney said.

Kenny held an unlit cigarette cupped in his hand.

You believe what, Chimney? I asked. I wanted a drink.

What’s that? For a moment Chimney looked at me as if I was a figure of incomprehensible needs.

1965? My dad asked.

’63, Kenny said.

High wind halted the conversation. We were not acquainted enough to shout at each other in heavy winds like four men who had worked on the same boat for years. Then my dad shouted, Stronsay! The cry was, in both tone and motivation, uninterpretable, and thus, an upholder of the family tradition.

I pointed to Kenny’s hand. Would you have an extra? I asked. Now my locution was slipping too, as if on mud, a runner accepting any steps that kept him aright and running on.

Kenny handed me the one in his hand.

Chimney said, I believe Crow – he pointed to Crow – understands the day to be a very fine one for touring.

Hello, Crow, my dad said.

Not if it’s your last, I said to Kenny.

No, he said. Take it.

Thanks, I said.

He pulled a box of matches from his pants pocket and handed them to me.

Chimney said, I’ll just get her out here, and we’ll be off then.

You smoke? My dad asked. I had the match cupped and the cigarette lighting. I didn’t know you smoked.

I don’t, I said, and inhaled deeply.

Either do I, my dad said.

Chimney pulled the Dark Green 1963 Morris Mini out of the shed and into the yard.

You know the Morris Mini, son? my dad asked. Apparently the locution had slipped all the way to front-porch paternal. I felt I should join him there.

I don’t believe I do, Pop.

Beside us the little car idled in its two little ruts. Chimney opened his door.

This here, my dad said. Not this exact one here, but this type of car . . . you understand?

The Morris Mini, I said.

Chimney stood with one arm on the door and the other on the hood, in his wool sweater and his tweed cap, with an unlit pipe protruding from the corner of his mouth. Are we ready! He asked.

The Morris Mini, my dad said, was your mother and mine’s first car. We bought it in Geneva in 1966 – the fall before your sister was born – from Cozzie for three hundred dollars, and half a badminton set . . .

I could tell that Chimney was looking at me. Beside me, Kenny smoked. I smoked too. I did not look at Chimney.

The badminton set’s not true, he said and laughed shortly to himself. He looked at me. Did you ever go to Cozzie’s?

Free peanuts, I said. Free pool. 95 cent Genny cream.

And Cozzie, he said.

And Cozzie, I said.

My dad continued, He sold it to us for his brother, who I think was in a nuthouse because he liked to flash people on their way out of church, or maybe that was someone else . . . anyway, Cozzie sold us the Mini for three hundred dollars. It had eighty-six thousand miles on it, it was four speed, and it was a kind of Burgundy color I guess you’d call it. Our last winter in Geneva rusted out the floorboards, so you could watch the road passing beneath your feet. I used to watch the road pass beneath my feet. Try it sometime. The next winter we drilled plywood boards to cover the holes up and your mom painted them with scenes from the coast of Maine. By this time Lila was born. Your mom was teaching the speds at Geneva High School and I was trying to finish up my senior year. Can you imagine that, a guy on your lacrosse team walking around campus with a baby daughter. Then New York came, living in Kew Gardens, Queens – that’s where you were conceived by the way – taking the train into the city to work, etcetera, et freaking cetera, and . . . midsentence, he stopped. If we do all have auras, at that moment his sagged, and began to collapse.

I had never heard my father speak so many consecutive words at once before, nor had I ever heard any of what my father was saying.

Are we ready? he said, suddenly.

We are ready! Chimney said, in a tone of bright sky.

Kenny nodded, and turned back to the house.

Okay, Chimney said, opening the door. Mr. Watt and Mr. Watt. One can ride up with me. Which do you prefer, Mr. Watt?

I repeated the question to my dad.

My dad said, I’ll sit in the back.

His voice was emptying of life, as if it had a leak in a pulled seam.

Good! I said, in a middling bullshit effort to cover for him. I’ll sit up front with you, Chimney.

Very good, Chimney said.

Once inside the car, my dad said, while petting the seat, The Morris Mini.

Thusly, we began our tour of the island.

The car bounced about in the ruts in the yard, passed the side of the house, leaving Crow out back, and turned onto the Whitehall road, where nothing transpired. There’s the post office, Chimney said, pointing to what appeared to be a boarded-up outhouse affixed to a rock between the harbor and the road.

Right then two things occurred to me: one, my father did not understand a single word from Chimney’s mouth, and two, a cigarette would have made me unspeakably at ease and happy.

Now then, Chimney said. Here we are heading out of our village, on the northern peninsula; our road here will take us to the center of our island, to the heart of the star, if you have my meaning. For in the old norse . . . There’s our grocery, there on the right . . .

I took him on faith, as we rounded the curve and passed a crumbling stone house with a tacked towel for a curtain.

. . . Star Island in the Old Norse. See we’ve three peninsulas coming together at Wardhill to form a star, or as it is also known, the missing piece from Njöro˘r’s giant jigsaw puzzle. Difference in poetry. For the same thing. Star and puzzle piece. You don’t want to be boarding the Ship for Tarshish from the heart of the star . . .

Chimney laughed to himself a bit. I did not know what he meant. I glanced in the rearview mirror, and saw my father slumped in the back like a schoolchild being taken home from the headmaster’s for glum pranks his parents would help him deny.

How are you doing back there? I asked.

Doing fine, my dad said.

A bit of a rough ride in the back is it?

Is it rough back there?

Doing fine, my dad said.

I committed to ignoring him for the remainder of the tour, and instantly failed to keep the commitment. I looked in the rearview mirror again. He was gazing out the window, with his hand on the sill.

So, Chimney said. Over the fields you have St. Catherine’s Bay to the west, and over here Mill Bay to the east, with the loveliest beaches you’ve ever seen. And you see our sheep and cows and the green green pastures, and untold artifacts buried there still, maybe no Ring of Brodgar, no Skara Brae, but maybe . . .

Those are? I asked. I had read about them before we came.

Those, Chimney said, are our ruins older than those of Ancient Egypt, on Orkney between Stromness and Whitehall. If you ask me, Stonehenge, clock of God or no, cannot compare with the Ring of Brodgar . . . There’s also the standing stones of Stenness and your Maeshowe Burial chamber, that means ‘House of the Dead.’ So here we are coming down into Wardhill.

He downshifted, the car jerked and settled and the rain began, followed by a heavy gale, blowing all the raindrops sideways, and buckling the car, and moving on. Then the rain fell steadily. Chimney pulled to the side of the road – side of the road is used euphemistically – and came to a stop beside a church.

This here is the Moncur church, there’s our school. Over there our airfield, two of the teachers fly in each morning from the mainland and fly back each afternoon. You see the windflags drooping. A rare sight here. Usually they’re flapping about so you can hear them in the village. It’s a decent enough airfield. We all helped in the clearing of the field. Somehow that would be going on twenty years ago. We are growing old, are we not, Mr. Watt.

Growing old, I repeated, in shorthand translation.

Growing old, my dad said, as lifelessly as a prisoner at the far end of an interrogation.

The rain pelted the car roof, and I remember – that is not the right word – the sound of poured gravel.

Ah, yes, you are right there, Mr. Watt.

I said, the church looks almost new.

’Tis, Chimney said. We began building in 1950, and finished in 1951. It is the only church on our island. We’ve Alexander Moncur to thank for her, a good man. He passed in 1944. In his will he left 20,000 pounds for a church to be built in memory of his grandfather, Father James Moodie.

I looked back in the rearview mirror. My dad was there, in body, and otherwise gone. He was gazing out the window still.

Dad, did you hear that? I asked.

Sure did, my dad said.

When was Father Moodie here? I asked.

He ministered to our island from 1822–1860. Before the era of our prosperity, mind you. It was a difficult life then, almost all about the sea. You were always fighting. That’s what our Father Moodie ministered to, people who fought with the sea each day for their living, and came home to huts laid low in the earth to duck the wind, and all the darkness over us all in the winter, and all the light above us in the summer. Our Father Moodie never once preached away from scripture. It was always from the scripture passage to our lives here, a direct relation. And as you may have guessed, it was Jonah was his favorite book. He used to say, from here, my fishermen, you do not want to board the ship for Tarshish.

Yes, I said. Yes, that’s right. Atavistic or otherwise, remembering the Book of Jonah or not, I felt some total forceful agreement. Perhaps from need, perhaps aesthetically. The infinite embrace and the fury of the sea.

This is, Chimney said, about where Father Moodie’s church did stand, but not at all the way his church was. This was built by a Leslie Graham MacDougall, architect, Edinburgh. You can see she’s a cruciform church, graystone. Not traditional Orkney, which has angered many, including The Missus, but not me. She’s solidly built, and good to have. I’d not willingly invite God to my island if I did not have a house for him! With this Chimney laughed, and started up the Morris. Are we ready?

I nodded.

So now, Chimney said, we’ll drive out and have a quick look at the Holm of Hum. Which sits in the Bay of Holland, named so because in the fifteen and early sixteen hundreds the Dutch came here . . . The Dutch. Of course, they were not of the right . . . constitution to remain. Not enough Viking . . . Ah, over there, you see, that lovely house, all restored and landscaped, and looking out over the world. A lovely home. That’s a couple from London, and I give them due. They’ve remained. Not even the winters sent them back.

My heart leapt to think of the woman I’d met on the beach the day before, sitting in her home I could see now, a mere two-minute walk across a verdant field; she was sitting in a chair perhaps by the fire, with her legs folded beneath her, reading a book, and Max asleep on the rug at her feet.

Ah, I said. I did not mention I’d met the London woman the day before. Perhaps their families are from Orkney originally, I said.

Perhaps, Chimney said, by which he meant no. I’ve talked to her only rarely, and almost never to her husband, who I believe made himself a fortune in the computer business. She’s a kind woman though.

Absurdly, I felt myself becoming irritated, protective, and possessive all at once. A woman whose name I did not know. A woman who clearly I felt was mine in need, if not in fact, to console me, physically, to empty me of panic, to twist and unwind me in the middle of the night, in her house by the sea, this unending stretch of narcissism I appeared now to myself to be.

We’re talking about the woman from London who lives in that house there, I said to my dad.

What’s she look like, my dad said, with the awful bluntness of a man throwing a carcass across a concrete floor. And as if, he knew, intuitively and implicitly, how I felt, and just as intuitively and implicitly, was compelled to kick those feelings about a time or two.

Okay, Dad, I said.

She’s an attractive woman, Chimney said.

In the space reserved by custom for my father’s reply, silence fell, and oddly remained.

We drove on with the Morris splashing through the puddles on the road, and the engine sputtering and taking hold whenever Chimney shifted gears.

There she is, Chimney said, pointing through the windshield as we approached the end of the eastern peninsula. Do you see? Just offshore. The Holm of Hum! A beauty. As wondrous as the Old Man at Hoy. He pulled to a stop at the end of the road. Should we have a look at her?

Absolutely! I said, with enthusiasm either real or feigned; I myself could not tell. Chimney opened his door and stepped out. I did the same. My father hadn’t moved.

I opened his door. He was bleak, then sullen, then bleak again. Dad, I said, Come on. It’s the Holm of Hum.

The hum of home, he said, flatly.

I laughed as faintly as I could in an attempt to both acknowledge his pun, if it was intended, and to discard it if it was not. The Holm of Hum, I said.

Right, he said.

When he stepped out of the car, it began to rain again, lightly as mist, and in breeze. Chimney stood by the cliffside with his unlit, and I now assumed, unpacked pipe clutched in his hand. For a moment, when my dad stepped out, I felt as if I was stewarding a frail octogenarian to his Lear-like end, and I was the Tom O’Bedlam, a son in disguise, and he was my father, even so.

We stood beside Chimney and gazed at the Holm of Hum. It was a natural arch rising high from the sea, a cliff section separated by erosion from the cliff itself, and then by erosion, arched.

It is beautiful, I said.

How old is it, my dad said.

Many many thousands and thousands of years. You can see where it sheared.

What did he say?

Imagine hearing that.

Stone tearing.

From the earth of which it was a part.

Imagine being able to hear the erosion itself, the hollowing.

The formation of the arch.

It’s quite a consideration. Ah, quite a consideration.

Its lovely, I said. The Holm of Hum.

Okay then. On to our western peninsula I should think.

We walked back to the car.

So, Chimney said, as he turned the car about and headed back down the Wardhill. Let me see if I can give you a very brief history of your island here, Stronsay, Star Island. The first thing you’ll want to know is the island – I mean the land itself – comes with its own priest, by which I also mean land itself. That is Papa Stronsay, which you may have noted when you came in on the ferry, the little island across from the harbor. There is interest in it from a monastic community called the Transalpine Redemptorists.

Transalpine . . .

Redemptorists.

That’s quite a name, I said.

French in origin, I believe. Transalpine because they were nomadic monks, traversing the alpine regions in service of the poor. This is what I’ve heard. . . . At any rate, Papa Stronsay’s Old Norse for Priest of the Star Island . . . Watching over us since the beginning of time. Human beings have lived on our island since the beginning. The Vikings came over in the eleventh century. Then, in 1472, which I believe is twenty years before Columbus discovered your country, if I’m not mistaken . . .

That’s right.

So twenty years before Columbus discovered America, the King of Norway annexed the Orkney Islands to Scotland. He ducked his head and pointed up to the corner of the windshield. Arctic terns, he said. Two. Did you see them?

I had not.

The sky opened, from still sky to pouring rain in an instant of deep meteorological privacy.

Chimney downshifted around the front of a curve. Beautiful birds, he said.

We drove down into Wardhill. My dad was asleep in the back, with his mouth open. Already the rain had slowed to a drizzle.

And there’s your church again, Chimney said, when we passed the Moncur Memorial church. I would say the sun suddenly appeared in a break between clouds, and shined down upon the graystone steeple, but even if it had – it did – it would not be to be believed, conventionally. The sun shined. Chimney said, built in honor of Father James Moodie.

Whose favorite book of the Bible was Jonah.

Right! Chimney said. You’ve a bright son here, Mr. Watt.

He’s asleep, I said.

I’m awake, my dad said.

We headed out the western peninsula.

There were puddles in the sun in the dips in the road, and water running in the drainage ditches. The green grass glistened ever so greenly and was crystal-tipped; the rain sheened the outcropping rocks in the field as smooth as stones in a running stream. And ahead of us, at the end of the road, there was the sea, the world in its predominant aspect, with little dots and smudges of land scattered about from Whitehall to the horizon. These were the islands. They may have been a fistful of stars thrown down by the gods. It was the kind of view to induce panic and to take it away, the inducement registering one’s figurine fate in a world so much larger than oneself it could only ever, even in silence, be a roar; and this sense of one’s terrific vulnerability became instantaneously and wordlessly a redefinition of oneself as an attribute of the whole, along with rock and along with sea, along with all in a frail ongoing minute angle of relation to the everything of which one was for now a living part.

Chimney said, There’s our sea.

Yes.

All our prosperity.

The road was straight to the land’s end and sparkling in this throw of sun. I believe it is warming up a bit, Chimney said. He cracked his window. I did the same. It wasn’t warming up that I could tell.

So, he said. In the eighteenth century, we began harvesting kelp, and the kelp industry boomed. It was used for iodine and soap. It made Stronsay a wealthy place for the first of two times. By the end of the century, the population had grown to more than three thousand if you can imagine that. Three thousand people on our little island here. Three thousand people congregating in the village of Whitehall on a weekend morning. Packed taverns, and a packed church, having to say excuse me on the sidewalk, to let the lovely ladies pass. Ah.

It must have been wonderful.

Short-lived. By the nineteenth century, the whaling industry had come. So we limped along with the memory of . . .

Kelp, my dad said.

That’s right, Mr. Watt. It was the crop of our prosperity. A gift from the sea that had been there for as long as the sea itself. But then whaling came along in the nineteenth century and we were left to get along as our fathers’ fathers had in all the years past, by fishing and growing and building ourselves, by going out in the boat and coming back. And many emigrated to Scotland and England and to America.

I thought of Peter Watt. As ours did, I said.

Ah yes, Chimney said. Many did.

He downshifted, and pulled over, and eased the car to a stop. Our second prosperity came with the herring, he said. If you could take the smell and all the hours, you made yourself a rich man then, as many did. Women in silk on a Sunday afternoon. Children running on the piers . . . My father was a herring man. So too his two brothers. They worked at it to the last, which as fate would have it happened to be about 1930, which happened by an unhappy coincidence to be the year of my birth. Ach, he said. He started the car. You see out there? He pointed off to the north.

Yes, I said.

That’s where our third prosperity will come from. There’s oil beneath the North Sea. Norway will take the most, the UK in the form of Scotland will come behind, then Iceland, but they will have to work with ourselves and the Faroese and the Shetlanders.

The Pharoah’s?

The Faroe Islands, northwest of the Shetlands, which are due north of ourselves.

The Faroe Islands, Dad, I said. North of here.

The Faroe Islands, he said.

Have you ever been there? I asked Chimney.

Once when I was a little boy of about ten I went with my father on Mr. McChesney’s old herring boat, that creaked and pitched and I thought would surely tip and overturn in the waves. It was a long trip and the waves were high and dark, pounding down on us. And then just like that it seemed to me then they settled and we crawled into Torshávn, so my father could have a look at an old schooner. That was the one time I went to the Faroes.

I remembered that I had thought of this man on meeting him as a goof.

Should we head back to the inn? Chimney asked.

Should we head back to the inn?

Yes, my dad said.

Great, I said. That would be great, Chimney, thanks.

Good, Chimney said. He turned the car around and headed back down the peninsula to Wardhill and on again the road to Whitehall. We passed Mill Bay again. Chimney pulled over. You see that rock out there, he said.

I see it.

What does it look like to you?

I don’t know. Hey, Dad, what does that rock out there look like to you?

An elevator, my dad said.

I don’t know. Maybe a . . .

A chair! Chimney exclaimed. That out there is the Mermaid’s Chair.

The Mermaid’s Chair.

There are two things important about the Mermaid’s Chair, Chimney said. The first is that a girl sitting on the chair can tell the future, the second is that it is the chair where Scota Bess, the old storm witch, used to sit and cast her storm spells. And the fishermen of Stronsay suffered for it. In high seas and darkness one shout from home. My father’s father, and many others. And many others. Because her storms would come right on the heels of your pleasant sunny morning, hiding behind sunrise, and then when the boats are out in what they think is a fine day of fishing, she sets her storm loose, and you know it is not any longer a good day for fishing but for misery and wreck and fate and drowning. And during the storm, so it was always told me, you can see her sitting there on the Mermaid’s Chair watching her spell with the faintest of smiles. Some said they’d seen her sitting there knitting as if she’s at home in her parlour room. Which she is. There were even those, maybe a Mr. Watt long ago before you, Mr. Watt father and son, who said she knit watch caps with the sinew of the dead. Mind you, this was long, long ago. Scota Bess. As the story has it, the fishermen beat her to death and buried her in a field near the Vat of Kirbuster. But it did not work. It did not. The next morning her body was found propped up against a stone in the Moodie’s field. So the fishermen buried her again, in a different place. And the same thing happened. This went on for months. And if you had been a little boy running across the field to school on a Monday morn you might have tripped right over her and then your satchel flying and then there you’d be face down in the loam with your boot-tips touching the belly and breast of Scota Bess lying there as cold as the firth, flat on her back, and naked as the day she was born and naked as the day she was beaten and died, the whole thing mighty indecorous . . . I remember hearing that when she was cut, only grains of salt seeped out, slowly mind you, only that and nothing more. Which makes me believe she’s not dead. For if she didn’t have blood but only salt in her veins, I don’t believe she could be called either alive or dead, but more simply, here with us. Which she is, I believe. She just is, like fate and the sea. From a certain perspective, it is only we who live and die, because we think in terms of life and death, but even the events in which we play part, from the smallest to the grand, they are neither alive nor dead, but simply are. For example, a boat goes down in the storm. Well, your grandfather died, but the moment in which he died is neither alive nor dead but simply sea, boat, storm and suffering . . . Ah, I’ve trailed off course, far off course. Back to Scota Bess then. When her body appeared again, for the untold time, on a chilly morning, beneath your set of angry clouds, the fishermen, who as you can imagine I would certainly hope, the fishermen were either drunk all the time or suffering terror in ways the doctor could not answer . . . not that he was a doctor in the genuine medical sense, Mr. Watt. Chimney laughed to himself. So the fishermen, the drunks and the suffocates, agreed that Scota Bess had to be buried in the bottom of the loch, the loch and not the sea because the sea was her home and its salt was her blood. So they loaded her in a boat and paddled out to the very middle of the Meikle waters, as fine a trout-fishing as you’ll find. It was night, winter, cold and darker than your own death, mind you, and the loch was darker still, and colder still, and there were twenty trout boats paddling in silence to the middle of the loch. It is said you could hear only their paddles dipping into the water, and the boat bottoms sliding along the water, and the fishermen breathing. Only that and nothing more. If you’d been standing on the loch shore as many of the missus were, in the cold and dark, especially those who’d lost their husbands to Scota Bess, you would have heard only that. You could not see the men in their boats, and if you were in the boats, you could not see the women on shore; you could not see the man in the boat before you, nor the man in the boat behind you. You could not see your hand in front of your own face. You heard the oars in their oarlocks creak, and the oars themselves being pulled through the water. The boats met up in the middle of the loch, with the boat bearing Scota Bess in the very middle, with a 10 kilo stone secured to her belly with a pier rope and her wrists and ankles likewise bound. There are four men in the boat bearing her. One man takes her under the arms, one takes her by the ankles, one man has his hands beneath her back, and the last man with his hands beneath her thighs, and then gently, slowly, silently they lifted her and you could hear the old boat groan and creak with the weight of it. And you could hear the exertion of it. And they swayed her slightly once and then dumped her in darkness over the hull. And you heard the splash, the heavy thud followed by a rushing clap, and then the bubbling and then nothing but the sound of the boats coming back to shore.

I didn’t get any of that, my dad said. He said, Did you understand him? As if Chimney was not there, or as if he did not care that he was.

That’s an amazing story, I said.

Chimney put the Morris in gear, pulled back onto the road. He glanced in the rearview mirror. Scota Bess, Mr. Watt, he said. Scoe Ta Bess.

When we had returned to the inn, and my father and I stood for a moment at the tops of the stairs, before my father disappeared for the rest of the day and the night following, and the day and the night after that, into his room, and beneath the blankets, he said, flatly, I didn’t understand a word he said.

That’s okay, I said. I did.

I left him in his doorway and went down to the bar, where I bought a pack of cigarettes and a six pack of McEwan’s. Then I returned to the den on the second floor, beside his room, and watched Jana Novotna fall apart in the finals of Wimbledon to Steffi Graf. She was up 5–1 in the third, a mere game away from winning the title, and she committed what may be the worst choke in tennis history; it was an awful and captivating spectacle, to watch another human being, so capable just moments before of near athletic perfection, collapse so totally, brought down violently by pressure and by doubt. And it was equally riveting to watch Steffi Graf, as beautiful and elegant and fierce a woman to ever play the game, become bewildered by the self-inflicted loss of her opponent, near the end, and to move from bewilderment to pity, as Jana Novotna literally cried on the Duchess of Kent’s shoulders during the awards ceremony. It seemed to me then and now a reminder.

After the match I went to my room and remained for the rest of the afternoon and on into the night. I lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling; it was not genuine. I blew smoke rings; I read Plato by the window. I was a man alone in a room, as my father had been before me, as his father had been before him, and his father and his father and his father and his father. A figurine slipped from every role, and left in a stretch of still-worn night, with every next moment to fill. With what?

I didn’t drink. Then I drank, alone, for the first time. I can’t remember how much I drank. I walked back to the bar at night with my satchel and took a bottle of Highland Park and stuffed it in the bag, with a few McEwan’s and another pack of cigarettes, and returned to my room and drank. I will never be able to forget why I drank as I sat in the dark, by the window, pouring the whiskey into my sink glass, and draining it down, and pouring again as the sky hovered in a four-hour dusk drawn curtains could not vanquish. I smoked and drank, and felt my body begin to numb. And if all of my nerves clamored, among so many dyings, to be a vigil against forgetting, it was me who wanted only to forget, whatever needed to be forgotten, by all those who needed to forget. And I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I was too transfixed by my wounds, imagined and real, remembered and fabricated, inherited. I was alone in my overestimation and my underestimation of my self and its history. I had Plato, the Bollingen edition, in green cloth, with a sewn binding, and a thousand pages of consciousness figuring itself into mystery for words, idealizing a Republic bereft of poets. And I was embarrassed that I was so confused, and that in my confusion I would turn to a book for a consolation; I wanted so much to be saved. From what? What atavistic will for penitence remained, what lung-driven need for redemption? Which hurts were mine, which my father’s, which his father’s, which in and beyond us all? The sea was the sea but the dark would not come. What came in its place, as insinuation and characteristic, was the fact – for the first time known to me – was the articulation beyond our ability for utterance, voluble or otherwise. It was three a.m., on the island in the sea, and I drank and smoked in my room, in a chair by the window, with the book of Plato closed on my lap. I poured another and finished another beer. And I knew then that when the Old Man of Hoy, who stood in the firth, looked in judgment or condemnation or sorrow or indifference or pity upon me and my father, he was reminded perhaps of the Nameless Orcadian, whose boat he saw break-up and go down before him, at night, in a storm.

It was with this I went to bed, slipping into sleep like blessed drowning.

I woke a few hours later, dusk still hovering, and sat by the chair and smoked and read again.

Late, I dreamed of the woman I’d met on the beach into being for me, and it was the me of need – for woman as playmate, shelter, audience, queen, pool of light, singing and balm. And only lust, fantastic or met, could still the lung-flattening roar of one’s hieroglyphic and inherited panic. This flight into a different dominion, where the thunder itself deferred to your sighs and the Lions of Africa guarded your room. And lust, what it is – inferno, purgatory, and paradise converged – shined.

III

The last afternoon on Stronsay my dad and I stood in the wind at the edge of the pier, looking out to the sea, and up to the sky, and out to the sea again and the sea’s gray clamor. What each of us thought we thought alone. The roar of the wind excused us from talking.

I don’t know if my dad had anything to say, nor do I know if he had heard my drunken forays of the night before. I had nothing to say. There was so much to say, and to leave unsaid – so much to hint at, veil, profess – so much dumb want to admit, and no way of knowing how to admit it, to ourselves and to each other. I might have said, teach me who I am, or suggested that all my banter was a veil by dropping a profession of love in its midst. I might have reached out and pressed my hand to my father’s chest, and held it there to hear his heart. I might have taken his hand and held it to my chest.

We stood in the wind at the edge of the pier. The sea was silver in sunlight before us, and gray, and dark, and silver again. And the clouds bore dusk and its burning light. My dad asked me if I wanted to get a beer in the bar. I said I did. We turned, and my dad said, to the sea perhaps, something I could not understand, and the planks of the pier creaked and shifted beneath our feet as we walked. I wondered what I would do if he cried, or spoke words trembled by the crying behind them, or failed to speak, or spoke in defiance of sorrow itself, and drank to proliferate speech in defiance, or to render the prospect of breaking down weightless and without cause. And what if I cried myself and drank in equal measure and for equal reason? All the eerie companionship of all my father’s distant days and years haunted me completely.

The rain fell. It appeared, was seen, fell as rain. And it was beautiful and I listened to everything it said. And the sound of our hearts was the sound of the water. And the sound of the blood in our veins, it was the sound of the water. And the sound of our breathing, it was the sound of the water, and all of it was the sound of the wind.

In the wind was the roar; in the wind was the voice in the wilderness. And the voice in the wilderness was the sound of our hearts beating, each to each, and also alone beneath the stars that were like friendship.

We were a father and a son on an island in the sea.

In the wind was the roar; in the wind was a voice and the voice was the voice in the wilderness, ongoingly always.

I was afraid of my father’s sadness. I assumed his pain. I did not hear his irony. I was in pain. A panic. I told no one. I did not say to my father, I can’t breathe. My lungs felt petrified. I breathed. I did not ask him if he’d struggled to breathe in his life, and if he did, how he did, and even, why. I felt at that moment that I had to pretend in the face of it all or risk losing him again to a silence from which no comfort would come.

Here is my father. He was my dad. He was not a sea captain. He was not a fisherman. He was not a farmer, fingertips split, lips cracked, eyes shining, at home in the world. He did not build our house on the point with stones harvested from the surrounding fields. And I did not help him. And even now, long after the time of which I write, there is nothing concrete or exceptional to say about either of us, except that once we stood on the pier with our hearts floating in our souls like paper boats. Maybe our nerves were frantic birds beneath more frantic clouds. Maybe our eyes were our blank and opinionless innocence requiring veils – any expression mood-shaped. Maybe our minds, I don’t know what they were – hurt certainly, dreamy and echoing and unprofessed. I could have stepped from the pier. My dad could have stepped from the pier. We could be examples for sorrow. We could have stood in the not-night eeriness of the sky above Stronsay, and beaten the crap out of each other and fallen, and stained the planks of the pier with blood. We could be examples for sorrow, drenched in rage, clowns with fists.

The example was always right beside us. Trespassed against and you have trespass in you for the rest of your life. It seers down the generations. It joins up with the black pageant – this long depression – and the black pageant marches on. You feel it echoing endlessly in your veins. He could have tapped me. Or I could have tapped him ever so lightly upon the shoulder, and in doing so, tapped his father ever so lightly upon the shoulder, and his father and his father. I could have screamed at all his dreams, and his father’s dreams, and his father’s dreams before him, and then asked him, wittily, how he was doing. We stood – father and son – with scars unseen, and with awkwardness.

Did I ever love my dad for himself? Did I ever forego my own reflection for a glimpse of him? I did not hold my hand to my father’s chest. I did not hold his hand to mine. I did not open my palms to catch the rain that fell. The atmospheric conviction of a seed could be born up and carried by no one. I wanted as many beers as I could possibly drink. I wanted another river of whiskey to drown in. It was the only response I had to these pulverizing spirits of complaint; from memory flashing like people at night in woods revealed by lightning and disappearing back to dark and wordlessly revealed and seen again.

What does it mean that I would rather have hurt than see my father hurt, that I would rather have bled than behold his blood, despite the fact that he had left us many years ago with a breathtaking lack of remorse? It means that I was in my heart a force of self-reference. It means that I would evade the fact of another’s suffering by suffering myself. It also means that I trusted suffering as truth, in a way that I did not and could not trust contentment. It was the custom burned into my cortex.

I was confused and disappointed and vain and alone inside myself, drawn moth-like obsessively and mutely to the idea of pain. My fear led me to preemption. I was merely young and mostly unexamined to myself, alone with my father for the first time in years, and I sensed something terribly frail beneath my veneer. It was me, before adulation, before privilege, before dominion – the sound of a single heart beating. Wind upon nothing. And all my grandeur fell down inside me.

I remember the terror of light shattering; the random and absolute assertions of a fist. I remember my father’s childhood. And I have made it up also. It lives and breathes in me with a force equal to my own experience. I would give anything to shield him, as he was, then, a child. I would be his protector, and his friend, his mutual dreamer of a life comprised of new lands far from sorrow, and of love finally found

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Timothy Irish Watt is the co-author of the academic book, Shakespeare, and the Mysteries of Authorship (Cambridge University Press, 2009). “Orcadia” is his first published personal essay in a national literary magazine.