The Moorings of Mackerel Sky

Once Mrs. Perle asked Derrick and the students of her creative writing class to describe what true love was like.

His breath has the sweetness of lake morning

he calls me coffee bean

His hands are sandy and sweaty and strong

this whole beautiful day is like déjà vu

so I lie and I lie

under you

Derrick’s father, Stéphane, was a distant descendant of the Terror in the Night, Burrbank’s Congolese first mate and stalwart friend. The largest, blackest man in Mackerel Sky, Stéphane fell in love with lithe Millicent Stowe, her skin whole milk, her hair cavernous black, and they had a beautiful son the color of caramel.

Stéphane, pronounced like stay-fawn, and Millie, rhymes with silly, shared a love of the written word, French (both Parisian and Québecois), silence, and the rituals of the sea. They found comfort in things with depth; they both worked long hours, Stéphane on the waves on his boat, and Millie in the pages in the library. Millie always wanted to write her own book, but she never completed such before she died.

Derrick found comfort in his dad’s strong routines and his mother’s written words.

In Mackerel Sky, the cave at the foot of High Cliffs, known as the Mermaid’s Mouth, is only accessible at low tide. Although Burrbank built his house on the Aerie, many say that the cave was where he hid his treasure, and in the centuries since, the cave has housed many a cache and various secretive deeds. Millie wrote that there Burrbank first spoke to Nimuë. She also wrote that that is where they conceived a baby.

Burrbank would swim on summer days when he felt roots growing out of his feet like worms. He’d swim in the sea recklessly—waves took him under and tossed him back out on the shore, naked, spitting up seawater, and then he’d fling himself back in again like a sacrifice.

Nimuë laughed, and the sound echoed through High Cliffs until it was cut off by an eagle’s cry. She was curled up on her favorite stone like a Grecian statue, the water sluicing off her skin. She watched the land-man throw himself against the waves with endless amusement. Her laugh beckoned so he followed, putting on trousers out of propriety though she was naked, her hair covering her breasts with just enough peekaboo. She let him climb onto her perch.

“Your name is Captain. I have heard them call you this.” Her voice, the honey and spice of possibility. Her voice, the whisper after sex before sleep. She smiled and shifted slightly toward him, her teeth a choker of pearls.

“That is one of my names, yes.”

“What is another of your names, Captain?” Nimuë, chin lifted, she wore the necklace of her kin, the finest filaments of seaweed fingers woven around a dewy green orb that pulsed with an internal light. Burrbank saw nothing but her. He understood why sailors drowned for a glimpse alone of a merrow. She pulled him like the tide.

“Yours, if you’ll have me.” He put his hands on her wet ribs, her wet breasts, and she kissed him on her perch. Her tail split. And under a mackerel sky, the clouds a filet of fish scales, the Captain and the Mermaid consummated their love.

Nine years later, there on Nimuë’s Perch, they conceived a child.

Derrick liked that his mother included that Captain Burrbank was naked and the word peekaboo, and he wondered about what kind of powers a merbaby would have, and how mermaid sex worked, and what it was like to kiss a mermaid.

Derrick and Ricky kissed secretly all the time now, springtime, baseball season, birth and rebirth all around. The end of May on a date Ricky led Derrick and Duke along trails through the Skeleton Marshes where the Kingfishers dove. They walked a mile and a half over clapboard bridges slowly being swallowed by the tide. At the marshes, the shallows stretched off in a sandy ribbon. The seawater was warm and clear, and Derrick saw crabs scuttling about and schools of tiny fish. He held Ricky’s hand as Ricky nervously, bravely stepped into the water, and then kissed him until Ricky forgot he was standing in the ocean. All wildlife Duke barreled through, and he pranced around the entangled legs of his master and his friend, boys in love on the edge of land and sea.

They kissed in the Mermaid’s Mouth at low tide. They kissed at the edge of the ruins of the cursed Lone Dock in the Lone Docks, the cluster of piers and jetties and boat moorings by Low Cliffs.

Thrilling at first, of course, but as dangerous as it was beautiful as it was real, their love spun itself tighter daily, grew life and momentum until it was its own little planet, with its own gravity.

Burrbank built a great pier with the abundant Maine lumber and rooted it in ocean. This was named the Lone Dock. They say the original Lone Dock was cursed on Torch Night in 1721, when Burrbank betrayed Nimuë and the mermaids the third and final time. Boats that docked there sank; people drowned jumping off. Fishermen began avoiding it all together. The dock was dismantled, but a few great logs wouldn’t budge and were left pinned to the ocean. These ruins of the original Lone Dock remained, barnacled and blackened with wet and age and neglect. A new dock was erected next to the skeleton, and eventually a second and third pier were built, and together with the ruins they were known in Mackerel Sky as the Lone Docks. One pier was full of shops, anchored by the Mermaid’s Tail Tavern, two were working docks, arms into the sea, and the fourth sat in and out of the ocean, underwater but rooted to land, rotting through history and time.

The second dock was built because the first Lone Dock carried the scorch mark of the mermaids’ curse. The dock would henceforth no longer be safe for the harbor. Mermaids can curse the ocean around them, poison it to fish and sailor alike. After Torch Night, and the Third Betrayal, the mermaids cursed the waters around Mackerel Sky. Its bountiful fish harvest dried up and every net came up empty. Boats that once entered and exited port with fine winds and following seas fought sudden gales and whipping brine, the waves mashing on the bows. Burrbank turned away from the sea and to the woods. He found sanctuary in the tall Maine pines, and prospered in timber and masts for ships, and Mackerel Sky grew. But she still haunted him. She would never stop haunting him.

Burrbank was straightforward and smart in nothing involving women, according to the Terror in the Night.

In the middle of cutting down the wildness of the woods, the Piratebird lighted on a birch branch and taught him to replant.

Derrick liked stories about the Piratebird. Some people thought she was part of a witches coven, founded by herself and her wife, a Wabanaki wise woman, to mutually protect the land from the curse of the mermaids. The members of this coven supposedly called themselves Feathers of the Piratebird, descendants of the daughters of Esmeralda Burrbank and of her lover, the Burning Owl. Torch Night, the night Nimuë cursed the town and sent all those residents into the sea, the Feathers of the Piratebird, barefoot in bedclothes, brandishing fire, faced the mermaids as their men were drowning.

Stoic Stéphane, Derrick’s father, known in most circles as Blade, had seen many mysteries of the sea that flirted up to the surface, but he had no recollection of ever seeing a mermaid. He did not have time for that noise out on the water; there was work to be done, and distractions caused accidents and accidents caused drownings. He took his work seriously, focused on perfecting routine, trusting that practice made precision and honed efficacy. Blade had seen more than his fair share of fishermen funerals, and he almost gave up the water entirely when it took his wife. But he only lasted as a layman for three months; he was itchy, on edge, couldn’t find his balance or the North Star. Only when he returned to his boat, his feet planted on the planks, knees bending with the rocking water below, could he breathe again, did he feel whole. So he went back to lobstering, back to the bounding main.

Millicent Stowe drowned the end of summer, the end of the tourist season. Blade found the most comfort in his routines during this dark, dark time; they served as touchstones, as anchors, as moorings while the grief tossed him with abandon. He had had his established routines as a father, as a husband, as a co-parent, but when Millie died the old world he knew became a flat pane and shattered like glass, and now he navigated school lunches and laundry and doctor’s appointments, territory once covered by his wife, alone. Painstakingly, with much trial and error, and bumps and ruts and puddles that blew engines, father and son forged their own path together and grew new routines that became more streamlined each year.

Stéphane kept playbooks of Derrick’s baseball games, and he was known for sitting in the stands and writing in them every game he went. He liked to talk stats with the parents and grandparents and teachers that attended. He was loud on occasion, if there was a really bad call, but he was never obnoxious, and he was usually right.

Like his son, he rescued things from the ocean. He had a soft spot for wounded animals, and often sent pregnant lobsters and lobsters too small to catch back into the brink with a fat fish in their claw. He once nursed a seagull back to health, and it lobstered with him for the next four summers. He named it Plum, after an image in a Langston Hughes love poem, a favorite of his and his wife. He buried the bird in their backyard when it flew no more.

Derrick still had no idea how to tell him he was gay, so he said nothing. On the boat they worked a lot in rhythmic silence, though recently Derrick’s thoughts had been very loud.

His mom would have understood. Derrick’s memories of her were more faded now, at least eight years old and from when he was young, but they were all warm. She read him books and smoothed back his hair and smelled of lilacs and lavender and the beach. She spoke in soft tones and smiled widely. She swam in the sea like she was born to it.

Derrick learned the rituals of grieving from his father, at eight didn’t understand them, at sixteen found comfort in their consistency. He and his father were similar that way; they both were soothed and grounded by ritual. Millie’s grave was meticulously clean, always with fresh flowers.

Derrick spoke to his mother at the cemetery, standing over her grave. He went after baseball practice or after school every day.

If Derrick were to write about the night he was pummeled to within an inch of his life, his poem would be this:

Oh my heart

They have come to the beach

Carrying confederate flags and torches

the red hats with the white words

Like white walkers

They are drinking and pot-valiant

They will string up the Black men

They will filet the gay

They come for me

Then he would end the poem with a question mark because he thought he was being clever.

This Ship Is Haunted