Excerpt from my novel FATE.

A Limbo for Suffering Fathers

 

Each night as Emmet Meagher lay awake in the darkness, the events of that black day would play back in his memories, overwhelming him. The memory of his son with his bright smile and infectious laughter would flicker in and out of focus, a haunting reminder of the joy that once filled their happy family. The innocence of his eldest son Mark, was a stark contrast to the chaos that had engulfed their lives. Emmet felt a desperate need to protect Mark from the harsh truths of life, even though he knew that such protection was impossible and not fair to the boy.

 

       That same recurring nightmare would play through his now-only son Mark. The echoes of his brother's laughter, a bittersweet symphony that haunted him, would dance through his innocent mind as he lay awake in bed trying to drown out all he heard, both imaginative and real. Emmet would sometimes hear Mark's cry calling out at night to his harpooned brother. It was a reminder of the brother-brother bond ... a bond that had been severed too soon.

 

       As Emmet turned about in the bed, hearing his wife weeping, a haunting sound of grief that filled the dimly lit bedroom only deepened their isolation. He could feel a surge of anger rise in him in condemning God Himself for the loss of his son Marcus. How could He stand by watching his family being torn apart, and not for the first time, by grief ... that cruel twist of fate that had snatched Marcus away from them too soon? He wanted to scream because unanswered questions would never yield an answer, but would only play havoc in his mind and fuel the burning fire of his anger. He clenched his fists as the weight of their shared sorrow pressed down on his chest. His heart raced as he wrestled with his emotions, his anger morphing into a bitter resentment that he could not shake, no matter how hard he tried for the sake of his wife and son. But he felt a chasm forming between Fiadh and himself, a chasm created by their shared grief, a chasm they were both falling into. He noticed the crucifix was no longer in place of honor above their bed.

 

       As dawn approaches, the darkness begins to lift, but his darkest thoughts remain. Burdened by the knowledge that the ache in his heart would not easily fade, even as he struggled to find peace within himself. But it was too soon to find grief. Emmet would rise from his restless night, telling himself he had to face another day, and put on a brave face for Mark in trying to be the father he needed now. As Mark slept, his chest rose and fell in a rhythm that seemed so fragile, yet there was an underlying vulnerability to his stillness. The slightest disturbance, such as a creaking floorboard, a dog or two barking outside in chorus at the sinking moon, or the gentle tap-tap of rain against the windowpane could wake him. Each sound, no matter how subtle, acted like a thread pulling him back into the harsh reality of his brother's death. Emmet could hear him talking to Marcus in asking him where he was now.

 

       However, as Mark grew into adulthood, it made him a more sympathetic person for the world he was to live in, earning the well-deserved nickname 'Doc'. That moniker was attributed to his fascination with medicine from an early age, which was linked to his brother's death and his experience in serving as a ship's doctor during his time at sea, despite lacking any formal qualifications, but reading the medical books that were left behind in The One-Legged Whaler bar by that one-time friend of his father's, Doctor George.

 

       Nonetheless, it was the grieving one-legged whaler Emmet, who would never be the same man again after removing the harpoon from his son's small body. He did it alone in the bar’s silence after telling young Mark to bring his mother upstairs to the kitchen, sparing them the horror. He steadied himself as best as he could, bracing on his good leg, one hand gripping the haft of the iron and the other resting gently on the boy’s ribs as if an apology could be felt through a young body grown cold.

 

       The harpoon had gone clean through the upper chest and into the oak floor boards beneath, burying its barbs deep. Emmet knew what he had to do ... there was no pulling straight out, not with the toggled point locked inside the wooden floor. So he worked slowly, turning the shaft left and right, a tiny degree at a time, loosening the hold where wood and flesh were pinned together. The floor groaned as he rocked it free. Marcus’s small body shifted with each movement, a detail that struck Emmet like a blow to the groin. He hummed a lullaby through clenched teeth, not for calming the dead child but to steady his own breaking nerves. All the while, he felt that old Irish dread creeping up his spine ... the kind of dread his father Rebel Meagher used to mutter about when a house went cold in summer or when a mirror cracked without cause. A thinness in the air. A scanning of eyes watching. The sense that something unseen had already claimed its due. Right now, he was not alone. Emmet thought he heard his deceased father crying.

 

       Once the barb freed itself from the timber with that faint, horrible slackness that every whaler knows, he drew a breath, planted his one foot more firmly on the boards, and pulled hard. The harpoon came back in one brutal motion. It tore the formed track of tissue with it, opening the wound wider ... a cavity the size of his own fist. A child’s heart, his child's heart, warm minutes earlier, lay torn loose within the ruin of the chest, its cage collapsed and its function already sagging. No father’s eyes should ever have to see, let alone do such a thing, in his lifetime.

 

       Emmet dropped to his knee, the stump of his other leg barely touching the floor. The Holy Relic was heavy in his hands, slick with his son’s blood. And in that moment, the stories of the Jinx of Retribution ... the curse of the albino twin whales, whispered by old whalemen who remembered Captain Crabbe ... rose through Emmet uninvited. He felt the taste of vomit in his mouth. Superstition said, with good reason, that the pale whales were marked since before the Flood, creatures that carried the malevolence of the deep and found their way to once proud men who had forgotten humility in the face of temptation. He remembered the way some fishermen back then would cross themselves when white animals were cited, or spit over their shoulders to break an omen when mentioned. He had laughed at such things once. Now the air around him felt full of them. He felt the eyes of his deceased father on him.

 

       The Jinx stood by in its imagined vindication, cold and without remorse, as though the curse itself had followed him across oceans and had only been waiting for this crack in his life to open and live in a Whaling Station and in the minds of the people in a whaling village. A curse woven of albino twin whales, men’s pride, and the old belief that the sea remembers every insult ever thrown at it and keeps its dead.

 

       Emmet Meagher, the one-legged whaler, thought now that his fate was to stagger from one crisis to the next like a doomed soul to wander for eternity. He held himself and God accountable for his son's death rather than attributing it to the Holy Relic, though the harpoon became the catalyst for the death of his favorite son and a present from his father when he took command of his first whaleboat. 

 

He acknowledged to himself that his ego was to blame for displaying the harpoon on the wall behind the bar, for all to see his gloating pride in being honored. That favorite harpoon was the fine line between the pride of a man and an unhealthy ego ... Fiadh would say that to him, just to add to his hurt. Emmet could no longer ignore the truth that his pride and his desire for recognition as the whaler who had hunted and speared the Son of Moby had clouded his judgment. Fiadh was never too happy to see the harpoon up on the wall with its stain of death, and at the time, what could she do? It was a man's place to be a man ... more so in his own house. Fiadh lived in a time when men hunted the whales to help mankind live a better life, but in her good times, she also thanked God Himself for the whale, ensuring that its significance was never overlooked.

 

       Tears came and will come easily now to the grieving father Emmet Meagher when he remembers that day in his agonizing hours of a living nightmare that's pulling him into a Hell of torment and tossing him into that limbo for suffering fathers where suffering fathers go when they have lost everything ... especially a child. No parent is expected to outlive a child. Nobody could or would understand the depth of his loss. It was a bad time for all in the midst of a bad time. Lessons that are remembered serve as the bridges with which to cross rivers of remorse with the ferryman.