Listen to Kelle Groom read this excerpt.
“What you get is to be changed.”
—Jorie Graham, “Prayer”
APRIL 5, 2020
The last day of the third week of the quarantine. Pouring rain for two days. Sixty-mile-per-hour wind gusts. After the rain stops, cloudy, cold. Snow falls, a handful of petals tossed, blown sideways. The spine of my red dictionary breaks. After 6 pm I leave my apartment, drive to the ocean. Sunday, few cars even for the quarantine. Low tide.
At low tide, I cross the lagoon that fills at high, cutting me off from walking right beside the ocean on the sandbar running all the way to Race Point. At Race Point, I’m cut off from proceeding by a pool I can only cross in summer, swim over. Pass a giant crumpled cloth, dark on the sand, coated with it. Like a dropcloth for a skyscraper. Like it had been dropped from the sky.
At the breach, there is what looks like a boat to my right, still far off. A canoe, or kayak? Why way out here? Abandoned. Almost no one comes this far out. Last summer, there was a dune here, large enough to hide behind. I could swim in the breach, unseen by anyone walking the sandbar. This vast place felt private.
It’s not a kayak. It’s large enough to be a ship. Flat in the center, curved at the end, like a cradle. Middle pieces chewed off in places, a few wooden pegs missing, but most intact and graded, crosshatched. The heads black moss tablecloths. A wooden peg or pin is a treenail, trenail, trennel, or trunnel. Planking and treenail need to be the same species. Otherwise the wood will rot. Treenails were most common until the 1780s. Not used much after the 1870s.
The chewed boards are on the bottom, edges orange with rust. But the horizontal boards, layered on top, are mostly whole. Round holes large enough to put a finger through. Some holes are filled with shells. A pink shell in a crevice of one beam looks placed, decorative.
Right at the water’s edge, another portion of the ship pokes through the sandbar. A full four-feet of two boards, the glimpse of a third to the left with a round hole. Pale netting hangs over it.
In 1960, the 258-foot freighter Monica Smith, on its way to Nova Scotia, was grounded here. There’s also a coal barge in the marsh, so I’m told. But this is neither of those.
It’s April, so not dark yet. Sunset just after 7 pm. But I should go. What happened to the ship? Who has been here? If time is layered right on top of itself, how do I see it?
I circle down closer to the water, and the sand peepers peep in an animated way I’ve never heard before. As if warning or announcement. I climb the wall of sand, across the bar, to the ocean side. There it is again. That giant cloth.
Could it be a sail? A blanket-like material, but no person would drag a blanket that could seat a hundred people way out here. It’s about 30 percent buried in sand, and sprinkled with it. Navy blue or black cloth, nubbly. I’ve walked here hundreds of times and never seen it. But I’d never seen the ship before either.
I photograph the giant cloth. Curious. At home, in some photos, the cloth looks just as I describe. In others, the light makes it look vegetal, like giant beans. But the first photo I see is the one that scares me. I skip over it because it doesn’t seem possible. I mean, it’s just cloth! But it isn’t. In the cloth is a person.
Surely when I look at it again, I will just see a sail. But no. Every time, I see the same man. His head slightly tipped forward. His eyes are closed but not necessarily sleeping. Thinking? He’s in profile, eyebrow dark, curved, a feather. His nose straight, sharply cut. Large. He has a beard, the straight line of his mouth barely visible through the black fuzzy hair. He wears a cap. At his neck, a gloved hand has reached out to touch him. Resting above his head is something winged. The paw prints of a little dog run beside the face. My shadow crosses his cap and the gloved hand.
Each time I turn away, I dismiss it. Tell myself I’ve only made the sail a Rorschach test, that it’s silliness to see an image in a cloud. But then I look again. And there he is. The man with the cap and closed eyes. Looking familiar. As if he might look up.
APRIL 6, 2020
The ocean methylene blue this morning, an antidote to cyanide. A nice day. It’s what my Nana or Mom would say, women who grew up on Cape Cod. Sun the primary component of a nice day. Also, in summer, a breeze. High tide, my buried ship is under water, far off. You’d never know it’s there. I walk sideways on the tiny edge of sand between water and dunes. Find a small peninsula of sand going out into the water, a little island. Lie down on the island, close my eyes in the sun. A nice day. We had our first death from the virus yesterday. John, the afternoon cashier at Far Land. He greeted me about a thousand times over the past few years. Lazy, tired from work, my ancient miniature stove a hazard that set off the fire alarm, I’d buy lunch at the deli, dinner sometimes. John always kind. He’d been a nurse for years. Volunteered as a DJ for the town radio station. Loved Motown. Once I bought a dish—cauliflower mac & cheese or maybe something sweet, a blondie. John said, “I’ve never tried that.” I thought, you work here, you should try everything! He died in Cape Cod Hospital.
After work, I drive back to the beach. Low tide. I walk in the deep gully where the impassable water had been that morning. I love walking where the water had been. On the floor of the ocean. A secret place. Reach the sandbar, ocean side, and walk. No sail. Did the ocean take it back? But, no, it’s farther out than I thought. And now, it’s been wrapped around and around itself. As if there is a body inside, lumpy, wrapped in cloth, a shroud.
Last night, I’d sent my friend Larry my photograph of the man in the sail. “I can see him,” he texted. Larry is a painter, quarantined in his small condo overlooking the bay. He said, “All of us who are solitary see things in ways others don’t see. Not hallucinations. But secret things.” The tide a little lower now than last night. I want to find the boat. I can’t see the raised cradle edge of the ship until I’m almost at the break, impassable until summer. It’s almost like an arm raised. Under water all day.
We’re not allowed to touch anything now, plastic gloves for the grocery store, no hugging, no handshakes. I touch one plank of the ship. I touch the cradle edge. It’s solid. A beam. As if the past is this solid, this real. I knock my ankle against the beam. The surprise of touch. Down by the water, the horizontal plank is more exposed, another with the bend of a cradle beam peeks out. The hold is where I stand, planks like hands in prayer or cupping water. I stand in the hold . . .