Note: This story is predicated on a wood-inlay picture that sits in my writing space, a thick-walled adobe structure I fondly refer to as The Hovel.
From high atop the quartz and granite cliffs, I marveled at the scene below me.
But only for a second. Because what I was seeing was simply not possible. It could not actually exist.
With all the obstinance of youth, I closed my eyes and willed it to go away. To be certain it would, I rubbed my eyelids with the heels of my hands.
Then I opened them again.
Everything was there, just as my grandfather had said yesterday, on the occasion of my fourteenth birthday and his one hundred and seventh. His birth and mine had occurred on the same day, only ninety-three years apart. I had known that, or been reminded of it through photographs, for all fourteen years of my life. As the youngest child of seven, it was the only fact of my life that made me feel special.
But my grandfather also had said many times that as the seventh child of a seventh child, I had the gift.
I had frowned. “But if my father also is a seventh child, why has he never told me about this?”
His head shaking slightly side to side and speaking quietly, he said, “Oh yes, your father has the gift too. But he has spent his entire life denying it.” He pinched my shirt, pulled me a little closer, and whispered, “If you can figure that one out, Ramón, you will have solved a strange riddle that has plagued me all of my life.”
In my wisdom, I smirked. “Well, not all of your life. Not yet.”
He laughed. “Well, no. You are right. Not quite yet.”
I had no idea what he meant, and I wasn’t concerned with it.
After all, there were boys to scuffle with, and dares to take. And I had recently discovered that girls were not simply soft boys.
2
He left us abruptly the following morning. After he ate breakfast, he thanked my mother and kissed her on the cheek, a gesture that always made her blush. Then he shook my father’s hand in both of his and said something I couldn’t hear. Then he took to his bed.
My siblings and I cleared the table and then raced into the living room to watch through the window. The sun was turning the clouds pink, then gold, then silver and finally a dark grey-blue in the west.
But my father and mother huddled in the kitchen and conducted a hasty, very quiet discussion.
I picked up only fragments: my mother frowning and saying “What in the world is he...” and my father saying “...his time to...” and my mother saying, “...dementia...” and “He can’t possibly know when....” and my father saying, “Well, he might. He’s always been different” and he moved his hand in the space between them like a seesaw.
After a few minutes of that, during which one or the other of them was glancing at the door to my grandfather’s room, they finally gave up. My father had spread his hands up into the air in a gesture that we had learned long ago means “I don’t know,” and my mother had dropped hers to her sides where they made a quiet sound as they slapped her hips. We knew that one too.
The discussion over, they turned as one, crossed the corner of the living room, and went into my grandfather’s bedroom, though in the moment I still wasn’t sure why. Either to convince him he was wrong about something and coax him out of his room or—well, I wasn’t sure about why else they might have gone in. They hadn’t even announced their intentions to enter his room. My father did rap lightly on the door, but then he turned the doorknob and the two of them disappeared inside.
The instant the door closed behind my mother, my siblings and I gathered at the door to listen.
My father said, “Papá—” and then neither of my parents said anything more. For as long as I can remember, when my grandfather spoke everyone else remained silent, which is probably as it should be.
For a time, there was only silence, then a quiet wail, and then the sound of my mother crying.
To my father and my sobbing mother, his voice like chains being dragged over gravel, my grandfather said, “It is time. I no longer need or want this body. It has served me well, but it is too broken. You might say the warranty has expired. It hampers me more and more.”
He fell silent for a moment, and my siblings and I all looked at each other, still more curious than concerned. Our eyes were wide with surprise and our eyebrows were raised like question marks.
Then he coughed and said, “Not to worry. Soon I will rise again, but my body will remain here. Please dispose of it as you would a rotted side of beef: deep in the soil.”
After that we collectively heard nothing but my father’s and my grandfather’s frantic whispers and my mother’s sobbing. Then a final clear bit of instruction from my grandfather: “Please be quick.”
A long moment later, my father and mother came out, she in front and still sobbing and he behind with his jaw tightly knotted and his lips pressed into a thin line.
His reaction to whatever my grandfather had told him was reassuring in a way.
But he stopped and looked at us. “Go in the usual sequence and say goodbye to your grandfather.”
“The usual sequence” was my eldest brother first, then the older two sisters and the middle brother, then the younger two sisters, and finally me.
I crossed my arms and huffed, but silently. I would go last, as usual. Probably I should have worn the same expression as my father, with my jaw set and my mouth closed tightly. But I didn’t have time to put the look on. A panic rose in my throat, and my face flushed warm with dread and shame.
Dread that I might not get to say goodbye to my grandfather. He might leave before it was my turn to take his hand. And much worse, shame. I had already dismissed or forgotten—either was as damning as the other—the story my grandfather had told me only the day before.
The panic came again with a realization. I might already have gotten my turn without realizing it. That might have been the last time I would ever hear him speak. And with the same child-like obstinance, I had filed the story away as unimportant, even impossible.
I don’t know what Grandfather said to the others. As each of them exited his room, the sisters were sobbing as my mother had. And like my father, the brothers had their jaws locked and their lips tightly sealed against any emotional display.
The younger of the two, still four years my elder, had tears on his cheeks, but he quickly wiped them away and frowned a warning at me to say nothing or I would regret it.
But I only did my best to scowl at him, then hurried past him as the last sister left the room and closed the door.
3
Even as I turned the doorknob, I was not sure of what I would say or how I would say it, but certainly I would say nothing about loving him or needing him. That would not be manly at all. And besides, I was sure he already knew all of that. But I was vaguely aware that whatever I said must contain an apology and a request for his forgiveness—if only to coax him to repeat the story from the day before.
The door clicking shut behind me startled me even though I had closed it myself. Before me lay a new reality I had never experienced.
My grandfather lay on the bed, his head on a pillow and the covers pulled up to his chin, with the same dignity he displayed when he was upright and moving about. I was relieved that his blue eyes still sparkled with life beneath his bushy white eyebrows.
He called those his caterpillars, I remembered. Each year on the autumnal equinox, he would peer into a mirror as if to check them. With a glint in those eyes and with one corner of his mouth curled into a half-smile, he would turn from the mirror and announce that his caterpillars were still wooly and white. He would raise one index finger about shoulder high and say, “Once again, we will have a gentle winter. You are welcome, my family.” Then he would laugh.
The last time he did that was only several months ago. I remember thinking, Well duh. Where we live, the winters are always gentle, if you notice them at all. Of course, I didn’t say that aloud, but I wanted to. I was certain I was right, and that was what really mattered.
I moved to the side of his bed. “Grandfather, I—”
But he wagged one hand to silence me. Then he gripped my hand and smiled. “Ah, Ramón. The last as always, eh? But that is because you are special.” He paused, then raised his other hand and wagged his finger at me. “Remember the mahogany sea, Ramón.” He winked. “Never forget. It and I will be there anytime you need us.”
Unable to keep my opinion to myself—a trait my mother finds “appalling” and my father calls “crude”—I frowned. Earlier, my mother had said something about dementia, and my mother is never wrong, or so my father says.
So like a conspiratorial scientist, I bent forward so no one at the door could hear and whispered, “But is it real, Grandfather? Does it actually exist?”
He smiled and tried to nod. “Oh yes,” he said, “it is real. As I have told you many times, it exists at that place on the horizon where reality folds into imagination to form what is true. And you know, Ramón.” He tapped my chest with the forefinger of his other hand. “You know in here. You have the gift.”
He pulled the tapping finger back and gave that hand to gravity. It landed on the bed alongside his hip.
“But Grandfather, I—”
I would have inserted the apology at that point, but I was too late.
His other hand went slack, then slipped from mine as if it to reunite itself with the rest of the body of which it had been an important part for a hundred and seven years.
Then he closed his eyes, sighed and went still.
4
I spent a sleepless night, and today I mostly fidgeted like a ten year old most of the day.
Then I decided to walk to the cliffs. “Take some air,” as my grandfather had often said. “It will open you to all the possibilities in the universe.”
But even as I walked, the obstinacy remained, nagging me. There was no room in my life for silliness and children’s stories like “The Old Man With Enormous Wings,” the first story my grandfather had conveyed to me. He was very careful to say it was not his. It was written by someone named Gabriél Garcia Márquez. Or “The Rabbit and the Priest,” another story written by someone called Gervasio Arrancado. I thought that was a strange name for an obviously strange man.
So I knew better than to believe in magic, or “that place at the horizon where reality folds into imagination” and all that stuff. What does that even mean? When I was younger, I believed in the Tooth Fairy and that a rabbit delivers colorful chicken eggs on Easter and that a massive man in a red and white suit delivered toys to children in every house around the world.
But I am almost a man. Both my father and my grandfather have said so.
And if I am to be a man, I can not revert to believing in things that are simply not true. Not even for my grandfather. And so, the damp grasses brushing at my jeans and leaving them darker where it touched, I finally made it to the cliffs.
I was very tired. It was well over a mile from the house, and the farthest I had ever gone on my own.
But there it was.
5
The scene had not changed.
Far below, a fisherman in a small elm fishing boat was nearing the white-oak shore at the edge of a mahogany sea.
And it all came flooding back to me.
This was the same mahogany sea my grandfather told me about yesterday.
The fisherman was old, complete with white hair and a white beard. Those were much lighter than poplar. The rest of him was obviously made of much-weathered red oak. He looked a little familiar.
In my opinion—and really, what else mattered?—what my grandfather called the Great Craftsman had done an excellent job on him. Well, on the boat too, and the shore and the sea. But boats are often made of elm or other wood even in the flesh-and-blood world.
The fisherman’s skin, from his knotted shoulders and tensed neck to his chest and arms and hands, was the same deep brown-red everywhere that I could see.
His skin was taut and mostly smooth, but lined with age in places. His hands and shoulders must have been fashioned from the knots of the red oak, that place where the smaller branches leave the larger ones. Some might believe that was so they would more easily rotate, but I think it was so they would appear knotted and tight. Or maybe the Crafstman had used the knots to create both effects. Certainly, his hands and shoulders looked strong and well-abused.
The fisherman was dressed as we all dress in what I think of as the real world. Of course, he wore wooden pants. I didn’t recognize the specific kind of wood, if I had ever been familiar with it at all. But the pants had a yellowish-tan matte about them. He wore no shirt, but he had donned a thin vest that matched the pants but was a slightly darker tan. It hung open from his shoulders.
I wondered at that. It was not a cool day. The late afternoon sun was hot. Probably he had pulled-on the vest in anticipation of his return home to his wooden shack.
The shack was also below me on the shore, nestled closer to the base of the cliff. A bit of whitish smoke—perhaps teak? Is it whitish?—curled from the slender ebony chimney. So probably someone was waiting for him there. Good for him.
As I watched, he pulled hard a final time on the spruce oars, leaning back as he did so. That final stroke of the oars propelled the boat over the last of the poplar-topped froth of the breakwater. It also caused his vest to open wider, baring the center of his torso. In that space, a foot-wide strip of his strong chest showed through from his neck to his pants.
In the gentler water of the cove, he tugged the oars from the water and laid them alongside him in the boat. They were no longer necessary. The lazy poplar whitecaps that rode atop the calmer mahogany waves were lifting the boat and moving it closer to shore without his assistance.
I still couldn’t see his feet, but he probably wore flat, thonged sandals on them like we all do.
When the boat was close enough, the fisherman stood and stepped over the side. The water came up only to his mid-thighs.
He grabbed a rope—no, a line. My grandfather, a fisherman himself in his day, had told me the only rope on a seagoing vessel was the one that hung from the bell. Of course, the elm fishing boat had no bell. He grabbed a line from the bow of the boat, draped it over his shoulder and dragged the boat up on the shore.
And he was wearing the flat, thonged sandals. Mine are cowhide. I can’t be sure what kind of wood his were made of. After all, they were soaked. I wondered idly whether they had also swelled with the water. Wood does that.
He reached into the boat and picked up a large bag made of poplar. Even the minuscule inlaid straps that pulled double duty, both closing the bag and enabling him to sling it over his left shoulder for transport, were obviously poplar.
And he walked across the white-oak sand toward the shack. But he stopped. Maybe he forgot something.
But he only looked up. Straight up at first, at the cliffs. Then he let his gaze move along them to the right.
And he spotted me! I could feel it! Would he tell my parents?
But that was silly. He was a wooden man standing on wooden sand, having left his wooden fishing boat, which he had just brought ashore from a mahogany sea.
Still, part of me hoped I wouldn’t be in trouble.
But he only smiled and nodded. Then he raised his right hand. A second later, he averted his gaze to the shack again and went in to be with the one he loved.
I was nothing short of amazed. How was a wooden fisherman in a wooden world that had obviously formed at that place where reality folds into imagination able to see into my world? Able to see me?
And I could have sworn his eyes were blue.
Of course, that has to be my imagination.
6 An Epilogue
My obstinacy drained away without me even noticing.
I left the cliffs and turned for home, my only regret in that moment that I didn’t get to see the fish. I wondered what they were made of.
Maybe I would find out next time. And maybe some distant clouds in the sky. Wooden clouds in a wooden sky. Certainly nothing that would threaten a storm. I wouldn’t want to worry the fisherman.
As my grandfather had told me yesterday, what I had seen—what I had watched unfold before my very eyes—was all that was important to know. Not so much hearing about the mahogany sea, but knowing that it was there. That it was true.
And that all things are possible in this world as well as the other. That seas and boats and shorelines and people can be made of wood but move just as we do.
That a tired old fisherman can fight the sea every day, but eventually he will always return to the one—or ones—that he loves.
And that more magic than I could ever imagine exists out there.
I only have to be open to seeing it.
I only had to remember the mahogany sea.
I think I will never forget.
*******