Penance by Sea - The Freighter

I’m on this tanker out in the middle of the ocean.  I’ve gone from living in a Midwestern rambler to this iron maiden floating on the sea.  The ocean tries to drown us every day.  We slice through swells forty to fifty feet high, and when the calm comes, it feels like a momentary reprieve from the wrath of an angry mother.

I know nothing that is required of a ship mate.  I got this gig from the captain, who I went to school with a hundred years ago.  We fought on the playground, we played tricks on each other, I egged his house, and then we became best friends.  We would ride our bikes to the edge of town and hunt for a giant snake rumored to be living in the gulch.  We traumatized a possum we found living in an oak tree.  We built tree houses, started fires in fields of dried grass, and then his sister died and his parents moved them out to the West Coast to forget.

Twenty years can change a guy.  Harris is thick and hairy; best way I have to describe him.  His arms are like stumps, his neck sunburned and gnarled like an old log.  Beneath his cap he is bald as a cannon ball, but  he is almost never without his cap.  Teeth aren’t so great, and he squints because he doesn’t want to buy glasses or wear contacts.

I am his polar opposite.  I wear reading glasses.  My arms are skinny and my skin sallow for lack of hard work and sun, but I’m hoping all of that changes after three months out at sea.  So far I’m spared much of the heavy lifting because the first week I broke my arm and spent days laid up in the infirmary.  Then as the sea swelled my stomach turned inside out.  Yes, I am infirm.  I brought along several novels and have started a ship library for the rest of the crew, though I think they would prefer I replace Joseph Conrad and John Steinbeck with Playboy and Penthouse.  Little do they know the joys of Lawrence and Nin.    

Why am I out here?  Unlike Harris’s parents, who ran away to forget, I have followed to remember.  You see, I killed Harris’s sister.  It was an accident, but something for which I never took responsibility.  But the mind does not absolve one who knows the truth.  The soul grows sick from a wrong never made right.