Tidal Wave

ONCE, IN MY GRANNY’S, the flooding tide rode the stream, slipped through the hemp hedge, passed through the cornfield and gathered to a brimming fullness in the yard. I splashed around delightedly in my bare feet, looking for goby and shrimp; my joy went right into my teeth like the chirps of a baby lark. Normally the mere sight of me was enough to set granny talking about the old days: she would talk endlessly, like the silkworm makes its thread, but today she stood there without a word and looked out to sea, her face already very old, reddening like the gentle rays of the evening sun. At the time I had no idea why she was doing this. Indeed it wasn't until she was dead that I found out. My granddad was a boatman, a fisher of distant seas. One winter before I was born, he was caught in a bitter wind and swept into the sea; he never came back. Presumably it was the sight of her husband's sea driving into her yard that rooted granny there, wordless, red-faced.

The Singer

When the song of Chilmajae's finest singer lost its edge, his antidote was to twirl the twelve-string streamer on his head; when his song got boring, he liked to stand a cowled monk on his shoulder. For the funeral bier he had a brass handbell that shone like the sun, which he hung on the front. The singer's song reached from this world to the next.

One morning when our village singer was not engaged in song, I saw him removing the contents of the honey bucket in the outhouse. What can I say! Our honey bucket was noted for the way it reflected moon and stars. He stood there, exposed to wind and rain, busily using our wonderful, roofless honey bucket as a mirror to dye beneath his topknot headband. He pushed his hair back up under the headband – nicely, nicely – and dyed it with appropriate decorum.

Perhaps this mirror, so special, so fertile, was also the source of his song, which was so luxuriantly effective in bridging this world and the next.