There’s a saint for everything, they say, and the people of Saint Clemeth knew this to be so. After all, if the Good Lord could spare a saint for Saint Clemeth, he must have them fit to burn.
It’s a lonely little place, Saint Clemeth. Not bad, but lonely. Empty and treeless, with only the sea spray and the gull-cry and the mourning of the seals to make an impact on the world. The seals do that the most, with their calls. Those sorrowful night-cries of theirs sounded like someone very young, or maybe very old, and very unhappy either way; one-of-a-kind-anywhere-ever. The people of Saint Clemeth knew that a special sort of seal that made a special sort of wailing like that needed a special sort of name. So they called them wailing seals.
Saint Clemeth was not the patron saint of imagination. He was a straightforward sort of man, who’d dethroned the king of the rocks and opened Saint Clemeth (the island) to the Good News and all that sort of thing, then up and died and left a little cairn that was currently tucked behind a neat white church perched above a small and brightly-painted town nestled on the shores of Saint Clemeth. The island.
The people of Saint Clemeth lived the time the Lord allotted each of them long, full, and slow. If you could paint someone’s life, most of the people of Saint Clemeth would look very similar: a big, broad, blue line that stretched on across the canvass and petered off to a neat little tapered end. If you looked very closely, perhaps with some sort of microscope, there’d be a miniscule little blip every twelve months when the fishing festival of Saint Clemeth (the saint) happened. If a family fisherman caught the crown-fish, that little blip of excitement would be visible with the naked eye. And that would be about that.
It’d been eleven months and about thirty days of waiting and here it was again. The sort of day that made the sea spray high and the seals wail low, the time for that little blip in the slow blue lives of Saint Clemeth’s fishermen, where they’d grab their line and tackle and nets and tricks and boots and stomp on down to the docks in the afternoon, with all the town watching with binoculars and telescopes and squints and in the case of Mad Mortimer his seeing-eye gull. Mad Mortimer swore up and down and on a blue moon that the cranky little bird worked, but he also swore up and down and on a blue moon that he’d never walked into the side of his house ever, or at least more than once, and certainly not in front of witnesses no sir, so he wasn’t what most people called trusty.
Mad Mortimer was a big, big man, and so was the dent in the side of his house, worn smooth by salt air and repeated collisions after pub night (most nights). In fact, it was so big that if you stood very still in it with your back against the wall and held your breath and if you were as small as little Susan was, you’d almost vanish from the street if people weren’t looking too closely. Little Susan found this very useful, especially when her mother was chasing after her to cut her hair for the festival.
“SUUUUUUUU-SIEEEEE!” came the Voice with a pealing clang-clong-cling that’d have driven pride into a church bell’s heart. “COME RIGHT HERE THIS INSTANT I MEAN IT” and so on and so forth, all the words and threats blurring into one big fuzzy siren that told little Susan that she’d better keep moving, because her mother was hunting fast and hard. No stone would be unturned, no doorstep unpeered, no neighbour unquestioned. Little Susan would have her haircut so she could be at the docks promptly and timely to wish her elder brother Stanley good-luck before he headed out to help Uncle Benson fish for the crown, and if she happened to think Stanley was the biggest louse ever to escape from a lobster trap and scuttle into town in the guise of a human, well she’d just have to keep it to herself. Little Susan had resolved that she would sooner die than suffer such tyranny, but she’d rather it not be of embarrassment: her mother was a mighty and skilled woman in many ways, but she was a terror with a pair of scissors. She needed an escape route, and fast.
“SUUUUUUUU-SIE!” called the voice, sharper now.
That’d torn it; next she’d be using little Susan’s full name. It was time to get serious about escape. But where? The streets were bustling, every path filled with revelry. Potential Judases. Her only hope was to hide somewhere her mother would never look for her, never suspect her presence, never even think to ask of….
“SUSAN! AGNES! MCALLISTER!”
Right, that was it. Time to head to the docks. Little Susan slipped out of Mad Mortimer’s dent like a wisp of steam from a teacup and eeled her way downhill in the alleys and byways, head held low and feet drumming along like a double-time marching band. An eye or two caught her passage – Kelvin the ironmonger, cousin Patricia – but so what? Nobody would ever suspect her destination, no one would guess that she’d hide right in the place she meant to avoid. It was utterly, utterly, totally, completely, absolutely foolproof, and she reached the docks with her spirits high.
“Hoy,” said Stanley. “What’re you doin’ here? Where’s mam?”
Out of the frying-pan and into the fire, little Susan swallowed the immediate grimace that threatened her face and mustered her wits. “Dunno.”
Stanley looked at her and frowned. “She wouldn’ let you wander ‘bout alone. Where’s mam?”
“Dunno,” said little Susan, calculatingly.
Stanley’s eyes narrowed. “You di’nt run away, didja?”
“No!” said little Susan.
He shook his head. “Figgurs. Unc Benson!” he called, turning about to his uncle’s boat. “I’ll be back quick as a blink! Jus’ got to drag me sis back to mam.” Having said his piece, Stanley turned back to find his sister twenty feet away and accelerating.
Confound the luck of little girls, thought little Susan. But her hopes were still alive. The docks weren’t a safe unknown anymore, but there were a dozen places to hide every dozen feet, and a dozen more of those if you were small and slight and willingly to hold your breath. All she had to do was dodge between the procession of the MacDonald children – all head and shoulders above her, easier done than said – and then weave behind the crowd forming (at a safe distance) around Mad Mortimer’s make-your-own-foghorn-from-a-tin-can-and-an-angry-cat demonstration, and then hop, skip, and jump into the nearest empty boat, low in the water and tied as firmly as a rock.
Little Susan peered out just above the waterline and saw her brother go dashing by. Success, and sweetly taken! But he’d slow down soon, and backtrack; Stanley was a loathsome sort, but clever. She’d need to take a more careful shelter, and look, the cabin door was unlocked! Saint Clemeth was watching over his festival after all, and over little girls in particular. So she hummed a bit as she shut the door behind her, and peered through the dusty old window into the bright blue world. Not more than a few minutes, and she’d be home and dry. Not at home though. That would be troublesome for a while yet.
There was a noise, and little Susan froze. No, it’d been a creak, a groaning of a board in an old tub that from the look of it had been afloat one decade – or century – too many. There were no ghosts in town. Not since the one at the lighthouse, or the one at the cairn, or the one that was in their basement. Stanley had a lot to answer for. But she was sure there was no ghost at the docks.
“Mmmmmmrrgh?”
Little Susan opened her mouth to scream, saw Stanley ashore in the crowd, and shut her mouth again. Instead, she spun on her heel to face any ghosts that might’ve been about and hissed “quiet!”
A pile of old furry rags sitting in the captain’s chair moved, and opened its bleary brown eyes, lost in a tangled beard much too big for them that had somehow spread from nose to navel. “Ffuurwut? Eh?” it creaked.
Oh, thought little Susan, and saw what it was. It wasn’t a ghost. It was old man Thane. He was called that so as not to confuse him with Big Douglas Thane the miller’s helper, or Little Tommy Thane who cried the Sunday papers up at Noonan’s way. They weren’t his relations. She wasn’t sure if ANYONE was old man Thane’s relation.
“Oooooh,” said old man Thane, looking more closely at her and recognizing a person, even if it was a small one. “Ayyy seeee. Whurter ye doon heer. Eh? Whuut yoo in me hoom fuur?” He had the most peculiar voice; every word he spoke sounded like it was being hauled up out of a very strange and deep tidal cave.
“What’re YOU in here for?” countered little Susan.
Old man Thane’s face was a mask of misery, a thousand little lines carved by unhappiness that tears could never have shaped, like a mighty canyon formed from trickles of water. It wrinkled at little Susan’s question. “Caant feesh,” he mumbled. “Bee indy wayy. Noo fest-“ and here he stopped to wince extra hard –“eye-vall fer me.”
“Stanley’s doing it,” said little Susan, filling the name with as much disdain as she could manage. “Anybody could do it. Everybody’s trying. Aren’t you going to even try?”
Old man Thane didn’t say a word, but his expression said everything, every word that little Susan had ever heard tale of old man Thane. Not Captain Thane, though he’d owned the boat for as long as he’d need to for it, been afloat for longer than any set of grandparents anyone could name. Old man Thane. Because a captain worth his name had to catch something. Wherever old man Thane spread his nets and cast his bait, that was where the other boats fled, leaving him on one side of the island and they on the other. And they’d snare fish, and old man Thane would snare his bent old brown fingers in his nets and sit there looking at them as if to ask what had gone wrong.
The next day he’d try the other side of the island. And it would happen again.
Old man thane: the man that never left his boat and couldn’t catch so much as a cold.
“Anybody could do it,” repeated little Susan with total confidence.
Old man Thane kept not saying a word.
“Well, probably,” she amended.
Old man Thane lowered himself farther into his chair again and turned it away.
“Well, maybe not you, MAYBE,” said little Susan. “But neither can loads of people! Stanley could never get the crown. Ever. Not in a million years.”
Old man Thane didn’t say anything. But he turned his chair ‘round again, slowly and laboriously, with a lot of creaking. She wasn’t sure whether it was from his legs or the cabin.
“Wuut?” he asked.
“What?” she replied.
“Hoo ye noo?” he asked.
“Hoo I noo what?” said little Susan.
“Hoo ye noo abut me cruun!” yelled old man Thane, stamping his feet and smashing his fist on the arm of his chair with a violent spasm. His voice creaked like leather and his chest pumped like a bellows, he’d gone all red in the face under his mess of whiskers, but his eyes weren’t angry, just confused, and that’s what made little Susan stay calm. That and that she was sure that if she ran outside, Stanley would be standing right there, sure as sixpence. Saint Clemeth seemed to be in the mood for giving that sort of luck to little girls today.
“I don’t know about anything,” she said, trying not to sound too proud. “My teacher says so.”
“Me HAHTT,” clarified old man Thane. He coughed violently. “Me hahtt.” He sank down into his chair again, rubbing at his face. “T’sawwl noo guud. Not witoot me croon, me hahtt. Noo guud seens den, noo guud noo, noo guud everr. Noo guud.”
That haunted look was back in him now, shrinking him where he sat. He was the smallest-looking adult little Susan had ever seen, as small as little baby Caroline that was still in a crib. And it was because he looked so very small, and because she couldn’t imagine a captain without a hat, that little Susan said what she said next, which was this:
“I could get it for you.”
Old man Thane looked up again.
“If you really want it, I guess,” she said.
He rubbed at his beard, fingers colliding by chance with a pipe that was lodged somewhere near his chin. “Tha…..th’…oon th’ rooks. Oop hy. Abuv. In tha stoons whaar hee poot et.” His hands were shaking as they dislodged the pipe. “Caan ye? Whiill ye?”
Little Susan looked over her shoulder at the docks, and saw no sign of Stanley. A seal blinked at her with watery eyes from underneath the pier; the affronted royalty of the rocks.
She shrugged. “Sure.”
Old man Thane looked at his pipe as if it were the most complicated object in all the world. And he nodded.
So little Susan left – after checking the docks again, carefully – and did some thinking as she walked, aimlessly. She’d made some sort of a promise now, and that was important. It was also a pretty big promise, from the way the old man had acted. That was also important. So she should go and do it right now, which meant thinking. That was hard.
Well, she’d check the rooks first. So she looked around, and she saw the rooks. Everywhere. Underfoot, in the harbour, on the hill up above, all over the place. Saint Clemeth was a rooky place, it was part of what made it hard for anything to grow there. It also made this hint of little Susan’s next to useless.
What next? Oop hy. Abuv. So little Susan looked oop hy and abuv, and saw a lot of big blue sky and only the merest wisps of clouds. She started to get dizzy, and looked somewhere else. That wasn’t very helpful at all.
In tha stoons whaar hee poot et. Which hee? Which stoons? There were just as many stoons as rooks, and little Susan was getting really annoyed about this riddle, which was much harder than the ones grandpa told when she wasn’t supposed to be listening. Those all ended up being about naked people and body parts. Body parts like the hand that descended on little Susan’s neck like a vise.
“Susan Agnes McAllister,” breathed an extremely quiet and deathly calm voice in her ear. “You are in so much trouble right now.”
Little Susan would’ve protested, but felt that uninstructed use of her throat might cost her her head.
“It is almost noon and you still don’t have your hair cut,” continued her mother in her absolute monotone. “You will have to say good luck to your brother with messy hair and a sore backside.
Little Susan cursed her entirely fruitless and now-deadly aimless wandering, but silently. Her back was prickling with the anticipation of the smacking to come, the air seemed thick with tension. Or something else. She couldn’t quite place it.
Little Susan’s mother paused for a moment to listen, and then little Susan heard it. Oh. Screams.
They were getting louder very quickly.
“What is-“ managed little Susan’s mother, and then Mad Mortimer came rumbling into sight, running uphill but with the full force of panic behind him and his heart in his mouth, bleating fit to burst. There was a sound like eight kinds of armour-clad fur-spitting hell coming after him, a racket that couldn’t have been bested by a freight train laden down with fifteen cars of mixed pins and balloons.
Mad Mortimer was a big man, and the byway that little Susan and her mother stood in was a small one. And he wasn’t about to stop.
In the half-second it took for little Susan’s mother’s full-formed, adult, rational mind to process this, little Susan had wriggled off and away and run for dear life through an open door, proceeding through an open window, an alley, and a road in that order, all uphill. Faint crashes and shouts behind her informed her sensitive ears that her mother was probably all right but angrier than before, and she shouldn’t check on her. It wouldn’t be safe.
Safe. She needed to be safe again. Not the docks, not the town, not anywhere, where could she go?
Well, right there in front of her, inside the church. Thankfully empty, too.
Little Susan reached for her second neglected doorknob of the day, only to find that the minister, trustless, heartless man that he was, had locked the place up for the festival.
She said a word her grandpa had taught her (inadvertently) and pounded the door and hurt her fist. Where now? There was nowhere to hide up here on the hill, nowhere to run, and if she walked down the road back into town she’d be spotted for sure. She needed to hide, hide, hide, the overpowering instinct that nature instills in children and mice, and she ran around the church in circles, hoping against hope that the back door was open.
Locked.
Little Susan slumped down against the door, resigned to her fate. That was when she saw her hiding place, courtesy of Saint Clemeth, patron saint of luck for little girls and maybe Saint Clemeth (the island) too she guessed.
Saint Clemeth’s cairn was small and cramped and something in it seemed to be poking little Susan in the most uncomfortable part of her rear. She wondered how Saint Clemeth had ever managed to fit inside it. Maybe he’d been small and cramped too. But as she heard her mother’s footsteps fade away in the distance alongside some particularly vicious mutterings, she wasn’t about to complain about space. Better a numb backside than a raw one.
Something was definitely poking her and threatening to undo that. She rolled over and around in the tight little cubby that was the holy receptacle of Saint Clemeth’s earthly remains, then froze mid-wince, eyes bigger than saucers, waiting three slow blinks to make sure what she was seeing was still there.
It was.
And so it was that little Susan reached into Saint Clemeth’s cairn, oon th’ rooks oop hy abuv the town, in tha stoons whaar hee poot et, and removed old man Thane’s hahtt.
It looked nothing like a captain’s hat, and it was much smaller than she’d have thought it was; a circle of rusted iron and blackened silver, dark as a lump of coal even when held up to the sun. It smelt like metal and salt and it made her palms itch and her mother’s voice in the back of her head go on about tetanus. But more importantly still, it meant that her promise was still good! Now she just had to get it back down to the docks and
“SUSAN.”
Little Susan’s feet acted without her mind needing to inform them, and that was how she stayed one step ahead of her mother for the first fifty feet of the race, because her mind was busy obsessing over how stupid it’d been to stand up in plain sight on the top of a hill with her mother not two minute’s walking distance away.
The next half-kilometer was a test of drive. Little Susan’s mother had a hide to tan and a child to discipline and set on the straight and narrow. Little Susan had a promise to keep and a deadline to reach – as they entered the town, the foghorns on the boats were sounding, the lines were being cast off, the wailing seals of the harbour were kicking up a caterwauling fuss at the unwanted intruders on their rightful dominion.
The last ten yards were decided on endurance and leg-length, and here it was that little Susan’s mother claimed an unfair and biased advantage and seized her up in both hands.
“What is THAT thing you’ve-“
Little Susan’s vision was a tunnel now, made of curious faces staring her way, a maze she couldn’t see through. Where was he?
“-rusty all over, you’re going to get lockjaw-“
The faces turned away as one, back to the sight of the festival’s launch, the boats all headed for the harbour’s mouth. All of the faces, except for one. Old man Thane was staring dead straight at her, mouth frozen wide open in shock, pipe dribbling out of one hand to fall to the deck at the sight of her and what was in her hand.
“-give me that!”
The last six inches were decided by a strategic elbow of little Susan’s, which planted itself in her mother’s side and halted her grip for a fraction of a second, which was just long enough for little Susan to move her arm on the last, shortest, and hardest stretch of the race and hurl the cruun at old man Thane, where it bounced off his chest and into his boat.
Little Susan missed what happened for the next few minutes, because she was busy being given the sorest backside of her life. It was alright. Afterwards, plenty of people wanted to tell her about it.
Old man Thane looked down at the thing on the deck of his boat for a long, long time. He reached down to it real, real slow. And as he straightened up that bent old back of his, he placed his crown upon his head.
And old man Thane changed, just like that, in the strange little ways that people change all their lives. He stood up straight, and he looked tall. He stood up strong, and he looked big. His eyes weren’t watery, they were glistening, his crooked fingers clenched and unclenched themselves into straight shape, and even his beard was different. It flowed, not bristled.
He didn’t say a word, but he bent back down to his work. A quick shrug and a tug and a yank and the moorings were gone, his boat was adrift, its engine a-putter as he steamed out of the harbour, last in line, serenaded by all the annoyed wailing seals.
Out there in the mouth to the wide open sea, the boats gathered. In a moment they would scatter, but not too far. This was a test of who could find the best fish right here, right there at Saint Clemeth’s. Nobody wanted to bring back some foreign fish, it’d ruin the spirit of the thing right proper. But before they scattered, they’d gather to wish one and all good luck at the harbour’s mouth, and that was what put so many noses out of joint when old man Thane chugged up in his boat and stopped there, right in the middle of all of them before they’d even had a chance to exchange pleasantries.
He cut the engine and watched them. The day seemed too quiet all of a sudden, even with the seals still complaining and all the other boats running.
“”Ey, move it!” yelled Uncle Benson.
“Gerout of there!” said Mr. Macdonald.
“What’s about that poky hat?” asked Angus the younger.
Old man Thane did a very unnerving thing here. He looked at each and every one of them, all at once, and he grinned, he grinned bigger than anybody would’ve thought a human mouth could stretch. He grinned ear to ear and back to the other ear again, and if there was ever a more fearsome thing to see than that, not one of the men knew it.
All of them shrunk back in their seats.
“Christ on a cracker,” mumbled Stanley. Uncle Benson said nothing.
Old man Thane cocked his head and listened to them all mutter, and then he coughed. Once, twice, three times. A big hacking rasp that sounded like someone tearing strips off a lung. Gunshot coughs.
Now, two things happened. First off, all the other boat’s engines stopped dead. Second, a fish jumped into old man Thane’s boat.
He caught it with one hand and looked at it as if it were made of gold for a long, long, long time. Then he tossed back his head and let out a bark. One, two, three barks. Big, solid, sharp-tongue calls that sounded like they came from a dog’s mouth.
The seals shut up just like that. And another fish jumped into the air and right into old man Thane’s mouth.
He chewed it and swallowed. One gulp. Then he wiped his mouth and laughed and laughed and out came the biggest tearer of a bellowing roar that hadn’t been heard since the end of the world, a sound that a foghorn wanted to be when it grew up. It shook the timbers of every boat present and it made the sea curl itself up into fits and when it ended the air seemed more fragile than it had been just a minute ago.
When it ended, old man Thane wasn’t there anymore. And neither was old man Thane’s boat. But the water was being sucked down in spirals where they’d sat, and Stanley told anyone who’d listen – just little Susan, as it turned out – that he saw a big old tail flip against the current and head down into deeper waters, searching for shining scales underwater.
Nobody caught any fish, not for three days. After that they came back, but they were scared pretty fierce for a while.
By and by, it came to pass after all the fuss had died down that the people of Saint Clemeth heard something new – or rather, didn’t hear it. The wailing seals had stopped their evening wailing, stopped up for good. Now they just barked and burbled and bellowed like any regular old seal did, and they did it all day and snoozed all night. Obviously, they needed a new name now. The old one didn’t fit.
So they called them Thane’s Grandchildren. And that name fit nice and snug.