Inheritance
David Sklar
Kelsie sat in the pew and tried really hard not to laugh. She was in one of those rubbery moods where she didn’t know how to sit still but had to rely upon that power of will that her mother told her all human beings possess, even those who are only eleven. It had already failed her twice today, and her mother had told her to cut it out, but no matter how she sat she couldn’t get comfortable enough, and the absurdity of her efforts was likely to give her a case of the giggles that no amount of willpower could suppress.
It had been almost as bad on the airplane, coming west from Cincinnati, but her mother had cut her some slack there, because an airplane isn’t supposed to be solemn—so she had managed to relax a little, though her mother had still insisted she sit up straight.
The church was nearly empty, and the few people who were inside sat alone or in groups of two or three, each group far removed from the others, with furtive looks on their faces as though they had only shown up out of fear that Kelsie’s grandfather would find a way to punish them for not coming to see him off.
Except for her mother, Kelsie didn’t know anyone here. The priest spoke in a nasal drone about determination and self-control, as though his saying so could make virtues of the unbending spirit of the man in the open casket, his face now twisted by the mortuary’s cosmetologists into something meant to look calm, although the old man’s stern, rigid features had so resisted their manipulations that in the end the mask of serenity gave a comical effect. Kelsie imagined the makeup artist struggling with this unyielding face and with the expression to which it had grown accustomed over those eighty years, before finally giving up and saying, “That’s the best I can do.”
“Stop that,” Kelsie’s mother said, and Kelsie noticed her fingers drumming on the pew. She fixed her eyes straight ahead and clutched her hands tight around the edge of her seat.
Kelsie glanced around briefly, at the weathered, pinched faces of the other people there. This was not the California of movies and magazines—no children of movie stars, no people who had come to make it big on the Silver Screen. The people here were the descendants of the prospectors of long ago, who had come out looking for gold and migrated north to fish on the sea, or to fell the giant redwoods, or because they had no money left to go home. These people were not beautiful, and they did not need to be; the land and the sea were beautiful enough for them all. And for Kelsie, this was a strange return, a homecoming to the sea; to the second home she had not visited since two years before, when her grandmother died.
Her grandmother had been beautiful—svelte, with bright red hair and with a life inside as though she were part of this place, as though the wind that blew in from the ocean lived in her breath and in the motions of her body, even when she was old. And at the end, when her eyes were full of loss, her red hair gray, and her face turned frantic, when she sat up in her own bed and pleaded for Kelsie to take her home, even then Kelsie could see the serenity of the ocean in her eyes, beneath the fear.
Kelsie’s grandmother’s funeral had not been like this at all. The congregation there had been scarcely twice the size of this one, and none had sat too close to where Kelsie sat with her grandfather and her mother, but they still were gathered together, like an aura around the family, and throughout that service she had felt their presence and their love, as though she were immersed in water, but with a dozen pairs of hands holding her up to keep her from drowning.
But what had puzzled her even more were the ones who had come to watch the procession to the gravesite.
They hadn’t entered the church, but they appeared to know the route, because every so often along the side of the road she saw them there, waiting for the procession and watching it pass, ignoring the rain as if being wet were their natural condition. Some were so pale that Kelsie wondered how often sunlight touched their skin. Their hair ranged from brown to black, though a few had red hair, just like Kelsie’s grandmother when she was younger. Some wore clothes that looked as if they had just come out of storage, with water stains or even mold, while others were dressed in clothes so new that Kelsie could see the creases where the shirts had been folded on cardboard forms. At the corner of Turner Avenue, there was a bearded old man in a plastic rain poncho with (Kelsie was pretty sure) nothing on underneath, and when they turned onto Seventh, she saw a white-haired child wearing nothing at all.
They had come out for her grandmother, Kelsie was sure of that, but when she asked her mother who they were, she said, “Don’t be absurd; we don’t know them,” and her grandfather scowled and said nothing at all. Maybe they were just strangers. But when the hearse got to where it was going, there were seashells and starfish and driftwood laid out to frame the freshly dug grave. Kelsie wondered who these people were and why they had honored her grandmother in this way.
“Stop that,” her mother said again, and Kelsie, yanked back to the present, caught herself kicking her feet underneath the pew. She pressed the balls of her feet against the floor (she had to point her toes a little bit) in order to stop herself from kicking.
There was a time, when Kelsie’s grandmother was alive, that they went, just the two of them, to pick up seashells on the beach. Kelsie ran like a sandpiper, picking up this small spiral shell or that one off the beach, then running back to dodge the incoming waves, although her sneakers and socks were already soaked through. Meanwhile her grandmother walked with serenity, her arms outstretched at her sides, inhaling the salt air deeply.
When all of Kelsie’s pockets were full of shells, she trotted up to join her grandmother, who stood on the shore with her eyes closed, facing the sea. “Grandma—” Kelsie began.
“Shh,” her grandmother answered her. “Listen.”
Kelsie stopped and closed her eyes and listened to the rush of waves and the call of sea birds. She opened them again and watched her grandmother listen in rapt attention, as if to some music beyond ordinary hearing. “The Song of the Sea,” Kelsie’s grandmother said, and Kelsie wondered whether the waves and the kestrels were the song she meant, or whether there was some other music that Kelsie could not hear. She did not ask at the time, and now her grandmother was two years gone.
“Stop that,” her mother said, and Kelsie noticed her right knee bobbing up and down on the seat. Kelsie clasped her hands in her lap to hold it down, and she wondered if this rubbery mood would ever go away.
After listening to the sea, Kelsie’s grandmother had gone on walking, and the young girl followed her on the beach, though her feet were cold and wet, as were her legs where the wet spiral shells had soaked through her pants pockets, and her belly under the pockets of her jacket. When sand gave way to stone, Kelsie’s grandmother climbed the rock face without hesitation. Kelsie followed, sometimes slipping in her wet sneakers, but light enough at her age to keep holding on, though her hands were cold.
When she could see over the top of the rock, Kelsie found her grandmother up there ringed by sunbathing seals and leaning against the side of a large bull seal. “This one’s mine,” she said to the seals, as she reached a hand down to help Kelsie up. “Got on the one the other one gat on me. And not a trace of that blackguard in her, so remember her when I’m gone, if I never come home.”
Kelsie was too flustered to ask what this meant, and by the time she had gathered her wits the seals had all moved closer, examining her and nuzzling her face and hands. As the smallest one rubbed against her, Kelsie, in wonderment, stroked the seal pup’s silky neck. She looked up at her grandmother, who was looking back at her with her fingers in the folds on the back of the bull seal’s neck, and the track of a tear on her face. “That’s sea salt, too,” Kelsie’s grandmother said, as the tear slipped down her cheek into her mouth.
#
As they walked back, Kelsie’s grandmother picked up strands of seaweed and dug up mollusks, clams, and scallops in the shallows. When they got home, she put these in a pot with fresh water, and she set the pot on the stove, and as it simmered the whole house smelled like the sea.
“There’s something I need you to find for me, girl,” she said. “I cannot find it on my own, though I’ve searched this house for it, but it’s something your grandfather’s hidden that’s rightfully mine.”
“What is it?” Kelsie asked.
“You’ll know when you see it,” her grandmother said, and she stirred the soup that sent the sea smell through the house. Kelsie wandered from room to room, searching without knowing what she was looking for.
And after the attic and every room on the other two floors, Kelsie wandered down the rough stairs to the basement, where all sorts of shadows made their home, and where, amid the clutter of more years than she could imagine, she found an ironbound steamer trunk with an old black iron padlock. “If I was gonna hide something, that’s where I’d keep it safe,” she said to herself. She felt nervous and slightly dizzy and could not say why, but she ran up the two flights of stairs to her grandparents’ bedroom, and, pulling up a chair to stand on, opened the top drawer of her grandfather’s dresser, where she remembered seeing an old black iron key.
But as she opened the dresser drawer, she heard the crunch of the gravel driveway under the wheels of her grandfather’s Buick coming home. Kelsie reached for the key, but the touch of it was so startlingly, suddenly, numbingly cold that she yanked her hand away almost as if it had been burned. She jumped down from the chair she was standing on and ran back to her room.
She quivered inside that room, the one where she always stayed when she came here, and she looked across the hall to where the chair still stood by the dresser with its topmost drawer open. She started to get to her feet, intending to go back and close it and push back the chair, but as she stood, she heard the front door open downstairs. In silence she closed her bedroom door, making sure to turn the knob so it would not click. She sat on her bed and shivered, and she hugged her eight-year-old knees as the mind of her primal fear calculated how long it would take her to run for the door of the balcony off of this room and to shimmy down the outside and be gone.
“Stop that,” Kelsie’s mother said, and reached out to restrain the child from rubbing her hands together. And Kelsie, before she could stop herself, responded to this startling touch with a sudden and luminous peal of bright, irrepressible laughter.
#
Kelsie’s mother seethed with silent resentment as they walked out to the car. Things like that just aren’t done, and Kelsie knew she should not have laughed but couldn’t say anything for herself, couldn’t exactly explain what had happened or how she could have avoided it even if she had understood. So when they got into the black Town Car, and it was only them and the driver, Kelsie tried to look her mother in the face and listen as long as she could stand it. But before long her ears had shut themselves within, and her eyes slipped off her mother’s face to watch the people out the windows who stood to watch them pass.
They’ve come again! Kelsie thought in amazement as she saw those peculiar, strangely dressed spectators watching the hearse, and she didn’t know what to make of this, that these people were here again, coming to see off her grandfather who had just snarled when she asked him about them two years before. Before she could really ponder, a very stern “Look at me when I’m talking to you!” brought her attention back to her mother’s shouting face.
“So what was so funny?”
Kelsie tried to answer. She really wanted to answer, but she didn’t know why she had laughed, and she couldn’t explain. There were things at the funeral that had struck her as funny, but none of them had been the reason she laughed. It was more like a ticklish laugh, like her mother had touched a nervous part of her and just released it. But who had ever heard of ticklish hands? And it wasn’t her hands that had been tickled; it was something deep inside of her, in her chest or her belly, or in some place that wasn’t a place at all. Thinking about it, she could feel it tingle again, and she started to giggle.
“What’s funny now?” her mother said, and her voice was like a bomb about to explode.
“I don’t know,” Kelsie said and looked down at her mother’s black shoes.
“You embarrassed me,” Kelsie’s mother said. “You embarrassed me, you embarrassed yourself, you embarrassed our family, in front of all these people we don’t even know.”
Kelsie wondered who this family was, besides herself and her mother. Her father would not be included, not the way her mother reckoned things, and she had no aunts and uncles, and now both grandparents were dead. But that wasn’t the point. She squirmed in her seat and wondered what was wrong with her, and as her mother continued talking, she looked for answers but found none. Occasionally, out the window, she saw the strangers along the path. And there among them was the old man in the plastic poncho, though there was barely a cloud in the sky.
#
By the time they entered the graveyard, Kelsie was crying like she was supposed to, not from mourning but from wondering what was wrong with her. She hoped no one would know the difference. There’d been some attrition since the church; apparently some of the mourners considered their duty fulfilled, and had left when they had a chance—which left it all the more peculiar that the same odd strangers who’d come to her grandmother’s funeral procession were here now, and some had even ventured inside the graveyard to watch from a distance. But while her grandmother’s grave now had a fresh arrangement of shells and driftwood, the hole for her grandfather’s coffin was completely unadorned. Or it seemed that way until, as the priest droned on longer at the graveside, Kelsie’s wandering eye came to rest upon the tiny white pointy things in the mound of earth beside the grave.
They were slightly curved triangles, like a picture of a ship’s sail filled with wind, and there were many of them dispersed through that mound of earth. Being so close to the center of attention, Kelsie could not walk over and check them out, so she tried to listen to the priest, and, when that failed, cast her eyes down into the hole in the earth. She almost forgot the small white triangles until, as she took a handful of earth to toss on the grave at her mother’s instruction, one almost cut her hand. She stifled her surprise and pocketed the white thing for future inspection.
#
When they were back in her grandparents’ beach house, her mother was talking to the women who had been hired to run the estate sale, and Kelsie almost cut her hand on it again. But she remembered it just as she started to slip her hand in her pocket, and, before her mother could make her help the estate sale people move tables, she slipped out the door to the beach to examine the pointed white thing in her pocket.
It was a shark’s tooth. Not razor-sharp like you would find in the jaws of a shark, nor as tumbled and blunted as one that had washed up on the beach: this one had been harvested from the ocean’s floor before the sea and sand had had time to rob it of its edge. Someone had found the time to dive for dozens or even hundreds of these predatory teeth just to mingle them with the soil that would fill her grandfather’s grave.
She stared at this for a while and then, not knowing what to do, slipped it back in her pocket and reascended the weathered stairs.
#
When she came back to the house, one of the estate sale women was labeling a ring of keys, asking Kelsie’s mother, “Does this one open something? What about this one?” while another woman examined the cast iron skillet that had always hung on a nail on the wall and had never, in Kelsie’s knowledge, been taken down to cook. Kelsie looked at the ring of keys, and the old black iron one was there. Kelsie slipped into the kitchen, baked a box of fish sticks, and took her dinner up to bed with her.
#
It was night, and Kelsie was walking down the stairs with her empty plate when she heard her mother talking on the phone. She could tell it was her father from her mother’s agitated voice. She set her plate down on the stair and sat down to listen.
“So I had the key in my hand,” Kelsie’s mother was saying, “and I was barely older than Kelsie is now, and standing in the attic staring at that trunk. And that peculiar soup my mother was cooking made the whole house smell like the sea. And I suddenly knew if I opened this trunk then my mother would leave this house and never come back. . . .
“No, she would have,” she went on, her tear-stained voice protesting now. “You don’t know what it’s like to come home and find the floorboards ripped up or the sofa cushions slit open. My mother ransacked her own house on a regular basis. And if she’d found whatever it was, she would have left for good, before my father could get it away from her again. . .
“So I left it there and walked away and told her I couldn’t find it. And the next time I came back, after Kelsie was born, the trunk wasn’t there anymore. . . . No, it wasn’t in the attic, where I’d found it. It might have been somewhere in the house for all I know, but I don’t know where, and I don’t want to know.”
Kelsie shifted her weight on the stair. “No, I don’t think I want to know,” her mother went on. “I mean, what could be so important it would make a woman leave her husband and her daughter, or make her marry a man she doesn’t want to?
“What made you leave? . . . No, we’re not talking about me, now, we’re talking about you. What made you leave? . . . Well that’s just it, isn’t it? That child has so much of you in her. And she idolizes her grandmother, even now. And I don’t want her to grow up thinking it’s OK to walk away like that. . . the way you did. The way her grandmother would have if she’d found whatever was in that box.”
Kelsie heard her mother’s voice approaching the terrifying upper registers that filled her with dread and made her want to flee. Before instinct could force her, she silently got to her feet and slipped back to her room, and under the covers. She cowered in the dark until she felt safe, and then, when her heart slowed down to normal, she edged her face out from under the blankets and gazed at the stars outside her window. A salt breeze wafted in off the sea and stirred the curtains to her room, and the smell of the ocean helped her feel at home.
It was early morning, and Kelsie woke to a seagull’s voice. She saw the birdshadow pass her window just before it was gone, and she sat up in bed and gazed at the predawn light. Slowly, silently, she stepped out of bed and cautiously to the door of her balcony, then outside.
The gentle sound of the waves mingled with the cries of nearby gulls and the calls of faraway kestrels. Kelsie began to hear in her spirit the way these sounds flowed together, and she felt them enter her body with the vapors of her breath. A light breeze blew the hem of her nightgown against her legs. A bell clanged on a boat in the distance, and even that did not interrupt but somehow mingled with the rest, became a part of that chorus. And as she began to believe that this was what her grandmother had meant by the Song of the Sea, Kelsie began to hear the other notes, the longing, beckoning voices, the indescribable symphony of the sea.
Then, stepping back to take it all in, she almost tripped on something.
Looking down, she saw, on the balcony behind her, an arrangement of driftwood and shells like she had seen on her grandmother’s grave. She looked around, and there was no one there, but when she examined the balcony railing she saw a damp print where a child’s hand had pressed the dew into the rail, and another beside it that looked like the mark of a foot where that child had climbed over the railing to leave this for her.
The sun had not yet risen, and her mother would still be asleep. The women who ran the estate sale would not be here for a couple of hours. Kelsie padded down the stairs on the balls of her feet, past the empty plate she had left on the stairs that made her uncomfortable for reasons she could not explain, to where the detritus of her grandparents’ lives and the other things these people had brought with them, the leftovers from other people’s homes they had not yet sold, mingled together on these tables like semiorganized sea-wrack. She found that ring of keys on the small round table where the estate sale woman had left it, but the iron key to the padlock was not there.
She went back upstairs, past that empty plate with the fine sheen of oil across its surface, and she walked into the room where her mother slept and, on the nightstand beside her mother’s bed, looked in the morning light at wallet, change, keys, and loose among them that old black iron key. She reached to pick it up, but it was like reaching into an ice-fishing hole, and she gasped for breath and pulled her hand away.
Her mother breathed heavily and shifted beneath the covers, dragging the blanket across the bed with her as she rolled. She was sleeping, but restless, and Kelsie stood as still as she could, afraid that any motion would wake her up. And, moving nothing but her eyes, she searched the room for something she could use to lift the key. And when she found it on the other side of the bed, she went across in total silence like a thief and pulled a hanger from the closet, dropped the clothes on the floor, walked carefully back, hooked the wire hanger through the loop of the iron key, and stealthily left the room and descended the stairs to the first floor, where she opened the basement door, which she could not prevent from creaking, and she reflexively crouched low and hunched her head between her shoulders.
She heard no sound from upstairs, so she went on her way, barefoot down the rough, unpainted basement stairs to the earthen floor below. The basement was barely lit from the hazy morning light through high windows, and the ironbound trunk was recessed in shadow and now had a wrought iron fence uprooted from the earth and leaning against it. Kelsie walked toward the iron grate and felt a strange sort of dizziness, an awareness of how easy it would be to let her legs collapse and just lie down. Her senses were foggy, and she could imagine herself sinking down into the earth of the floor without resistance.
She turned back and dug through the corner where her grandfather had kept his fishing gear, strewing lines and reels and hand-tied lures on the ground around her feet, until she found the thick black rubber gloves he’d worn to gut fish. They were huge for her hands, but she put them on, and she tried to lift the iron grate, but it was too heavy for her, so she wrapped a plastic tarp around her head and shoulders like a cloak, and she squoze her wriggly self underneath that black cast iron grate. In the clumsy, oversized gloves she fit the key into the lock and opened the latch, and, dizzy and slightly nauseous, she willed all her strength to push up the lid of the heavy, ironbound trunk.
Inside the trunk was a sleek, seamless garment of leather that felt like silk and was so deep a brown it almost looked black. Kelsie tried to gather this in her hands, but it was much too slippery, and when she thought she had it all one end would slide back out into the trunk. At last she tried to drag it with her, wriggling backwards out from the cast iron grate, but the tarp slipped off in her struggle; the bars of the grate felt like ice on her back. Her feet found no purchase behind her, and her hands could not push her backwards while also pulling that slippery leather. She felt caught, trapped, paralyzed, and her lungs could barely breathe. Her limbs grew weak, and a high-pitched ringing began in her ears.
Kelsie struggled but could not struggle, and she let the dizziness take her, surrendered to the cold earth. Her fingers moved slowly in the folds of the sealskin in her hands and half under her face. Her right ear was pressed against the floor, and with her left ear open to the dank, subterranean air, she listened for the song of the sea. Down here, in the basement, she could not hear the waves, and the birds were much too far away, but when she let it come to her she heard the rushing of the blood in her own ear, and the hidden music, the song that underlay all other sounds, she heard within herself, coming to her through the pulse of the ocean inside. And the music awakened the memory of an instinct older than words—older than legs, perhaps, and able to move without them—and of things you can do without trying that if you sat down to figure them out you could not repeat.
Kelsie let go and let the ancient instinct flow through her, and she turned all the way around in a space that was too small for turning.
#
She stands on the shoreline, with her grandmother’s legacy draped across her arm. It is slippery still, but she has learned to carry it with grace. Her head is cloudy, but as the salt air enters her lungs she can feel the mists receding, and settling upon her a clarity like she has never known. The sun has not yet risen, though it seems like ages since she woke, and now she does not remember how she got here.
She pulls off her nightgown and steps out into the incoming surf. The salt stings a place on the sole of her foot, and she remembers, vaguely, sitting on the stairs to pull out a fishhook that she had stepped on in the basement. Then she feels the surf on her ankle, and she hears the song of the sea. She peels off her panties and she lets them slip into the receding waves as she stands naked, just before sunrise, in front of the sea.
She steps further out, and as the waves erase the footprints she left behind her, she lowers the sealskin into the water and steps into it, first with one foot, then the other, and pulls it up, and over her head, and slides her arms into the flippers on the sides. It hangs loosely off of her at first; a grown woman’s skin on a young girl’s body, but as she settles into the salt water, something changes, and it fits her exactly—then it is her.
And, as the sun breaks on the horizon, a small brown seal slips into the sea, leaving no trace on the shore but a white cotton nightgown on a rock.
David Sklar writes in the spaces between the impossible magic of legend, the inscrutable magic of dreams, and the breathtaking everyday magic of the world in which we live. His first novella, Shadow of the Antlered Bird, will be published by Drollerie Press as an e-book in 2008 and as a chapbook in 2009, and he has short fiction slated for publication in Space & Time and two upcoming Drollerie Press anthologies. David’s published works include poetry in several publications, including Blue Light Red Light, Wormwood Review, and Paterson Literary Review;, and satire in The Cynic, The Wittenburg Door, and The FarceHaven Tribune. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, their 2-year-old son, and a retired housecat from Cleveland. Visit his website for more fiction and poetry from David Sklar.
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