Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [12]
The sea of course was stronger, a bully and a show-off. It wrenched the crabbing boat from Finch like a spoiled child snatching back a favorite toy, chanting, “Mine, mine, mine.”
“Oh, fuck you then,” Finch hollered out.
The sea laughed in his face, hit him with waves that were like tufted, braided ropes, over and over until he could feel welts unzipping along his back, his face. He started to curse the sea even more: “cocksucker, prick, son of a motherfucking bitch.” Then he realized he was going to die. He’d never been a religous man, but he didn’t want to die with some profane word curling around his tongue. He started to quote a Scripture, something about faith or possibilities. Then a hymn came to his mind; he’d just heard it the other Sunday at the Children’s Day program where Shern was the MC—something about a tempest and raging billows tossing high. He laughed out loud at the appropriateness of the song as the sea continued to spit in his face. He was drowning, he thought, and laughing. Now he realized he was treading water more slowly because the sea had clamped hundred-pound weights in his hands. Now he begged the sea for his life. “I have a wife who needs me, and my girls, three beautiful, well-behaved, perfect girls. Please, dear sea, wonderful, kind, beautiful, magnificent sea, please let me have my life. Please don’t snatch my life!”
He tried to remember what he’d learned about drowning all those years he’d spent on ships. Since he was twelve and had run away from home and lied about his age to get passage on that first ship as a sand spreader and worked his way up to pot scrubber until he finally made it to assistant cook, the conversation among the kitchen help often turned to shipwreck stories. They’d say things like “You better pray that the sea is a pretty woman ’cause you sure getting fucked if you find yourself out in it.” But what he remembered right now was the night Deaf-and-Dumb Leaned-Over Johnson cleared his throat and spoke the first words anybody on that ship had heard pass his lips. “I survived the Titanic,” Johnson said, his speech slow, almost slurred. “Wasn’t on no lifeboat either, wasn’t no such thing as a lifeboat for the colored help. But I survived ’cause I just give in to the sea.” Finch remembered how Johnson had turned to look at him, as if he were talking to only him; he was an old man, had to be past seventy, but his skin was the smoothest black he’d ever seen, the whites of his eyes brighter than the North Star, almost a crazed look to his eyes they were shining so. “Boy,” he said to Finch—he straightened his back leaned over from the years heaped on it, and suddenly he towered over Finch—“if the sea ever catch you in its belly, just give up the fight. Just give in to the deep. And if you not raised too much hell in your life, if you not filled with too much devilment, the sea might just carry you back to its top, let you rest on its palm whiles you can catch your breath.”
So Finch let go. The fight was leaving his body anyhow, and he’d never been a strong swimmer, too much weight in his legs. And the wave coming at him now was the kind that would separate a man’s head from his neck. He threw his hands up in surrender; he let his muscles go slack. “Take me deep,” he whispered.
The wave taking him over now was like velvet: its softness made him cry, made him think of Clarise’s hair, Shern’s chin, Victoria’s manner, Bliss’s