Zero Tide
By Jordan Escobar
His cruel hands, cut and torn tending oysters, came back to me. The memory of them, green veins cross-thatched with pale scars. Places where the skin never healed, where the hands just continued living by necessity and the scars opened up and scarred again.
I pressed the small canister closer to my chest, as the boatman throttled along. Every now and then, the prow would slap a small wake and send spray over the sides. I’d let the splash get on my face and eyes, let the wind drain it off. This harbor was the same harbor he’d come to every single day. The dark beds of kelp that tore apart outriggers on small skiffs like this, the maniacal laughter of gulls shitting on everything, the small otters, the dive-bombing pelicans, old boats moored and as crusted as the men who owned them. Buoys that marked deep trenches and channels that were seen and then unseen and then forgotten. Sea lion squabbles and their perpetual uproar.
I breathed the deep green of it, my eyes still watering from the salt. A small rectangle on the horizon gradually grew larger as we approached the barge. The apocryphal legend that loomed tall in my mind, often spoken of, never seen. The barge that cut and blistered men. That broke their backs and calloused their bodies. It was just floating there, aluminum lashed to timber. A tyrant stripped of its subjects remains weak, innocuous. I saw the object without its power, and when we sidled up to it, slipped a bowline to the side, I stepped aboard.
My father’s fortune, or misfortune, was earned on this craft. The company had long since folded but the barge remained, an arcane artifact of more severe times when men toiled against the tide and demanded the sea yield its unfathomable secrets. The sorting table remained, stained and bare, rusting about the legs. The holding trough at the center furnished no oysters, but the remnants of a few scattered shells remained. The sun and the salt had bleached everything in a pale profane dust. Beneath me, I felt the sea rolling and rolling. I steadied myself, redistributed my weight. I could imagine him doing the same all those years ago, his rubber boots, his grimy coveralls, the saltwater dangling off his beard.
*
Those blurry nights, he’d come home drunk and dangerous. The booze and work burning the veins in his eyes red and then redder. And my patient mother come to receive him, come to absorb the swears and indignant blathering. She redistributing the weight of all his frustration, of their perpetual poverty, of his hatred. Any small disturbance bore the full measure of his wrath, and depending on the day, the wrath could be insufferable.
He’d heard a story about how a man had won a cool million on a $20 dollar scratcher, and then proceeded to scratch away an entire two-weeks of wages. Scratching and drinking more with each losing ticket. He’d cackle in the soft limelight outside the liquor store wearing away the dull edge of his thumbnail until it was completely darkened with a gray smudge. Wild scratching and scratching, drawn by the sheer noise of it, the rubbing and rustling. Hope gathering like saliva at the corners of his mouth. This his only hope, if the right numbers just added up, everything would change. In the unveiling excitement of those numbers, he would see horizons open up, he’d see the dream, his own boat on the harbor, fishing poles and marlins, the sun setting golden on a distant beach. And in each losing card, the rage and frustration building. The beach growing farther. Until just a distant blur and then nothing. And then he’d look up to the yellow streetlight, draw thick on the end of his cigarette, the red glow barely lighting his cracked lips. A long sulky breath, the smoke blown out of his nostrils. A wild phlegm-wracking cough, spit, and then slouch off the direction of home, leaving scattered tickets and receipts in his wake.
And my sad mother waiting all night for him to return. Only the silhouette of her lit by a single lamp in the living room, to greet him in the window as he clambered down the sidewalk.
I remember waking to her scream. Cracking my door a bit to see his hand gripping her hair, her fingers viced on his forearm. And then throwing her down, the pitiful thud she made. And then ripping the lamp from its socket, he tore the cord clean of its base. And in the dark, I could only hear the whipping, and then sobbing, whipping, sobbing, and then breathing, heavy breathing, and then silence.
*
I opened the canister and saw the grey mush waiting inside. The boatman, waiting for me, idly lit a cigarette, said nothing. The smell of tobacco flooded into me.
That had been the last time we lived with him. The next morning, Mother took us to my grandparents’ house. In the months to come, the divorce would be finalized, and my father would become a distant speck floating on the horizon of memory.
His name lurched back into my mind when I got a call from the hospital. All those cigarettes had finally caught up with him. Lung cancer. He was dying. I never did visit him, the impetus of my own life too much to pick up the detritus of his. But when the hospital called again, I thought it the least I could do to pick up the remains of the man who once bounced me on his knee detailing all the intricacies of oysters, the mystery of their filter feeding, how after a heavy rain, all the runoff from the towns and villages would trickle down into the bay where the oysters would greedily wait, sucking up all the fresh toxins: sinkwater, hose spray, gathered dew from the hillside, anything that found its way into those tiny streams spilling back into the sea. Those oysters, my father would tell me, the ones that turned trash into meat, were always the best tasting.
Maybe it was some misplaced sense of compassion that bore me to pick up those ashes. Maybe it was something deeper. I wanted to discover that lost connection, to pry into the mystery that made me. What run-off sweetened my meat? My father was just another channel, among many, that had created this end product. He had shut his life away from me, cloistered on this barge with the deep secrets of me held behind his sun-frayed eyes. I wanted to know what lay within.
But holding that cannister, I realized he was just a man, delicate and now formless, made of the same material as any of us. Did I forgive him for the violence imparted on my life? His existence had been more questions than blame. And now with the heft of his ashes in my hands, I felt like I had all the answers I would ever need.
I looked across the bay, the sun still climbing to its precipice. At mid-morning, the estuary yielded to its zero tide, revealing to light dark secrets. Ancient oysters left untended that grew to the size of a man’s forearm. Cowboys, these massive oysters were called, and a certain rite of passage on the farm was to consume one of the behemoths in a single gulp. No chewing, just the wet pulpy mass sliding down one’s throat, almost to suggest some things unpalatable are best swallowed whole.
*
I don’t know why I thought I needed to take the ashes back to the barge. Maybe because that was the closest thing he ever had to home. I knew I didn’t want that urn hanging around my house. I took my sandals off and lowered myself to the edge of the barge, sitting with my feet dangling in the water. It felt cold, a type of cold you could never completely get used to, and the gentle rocking sent small splashes against my ankles. I tilted the canister between my knees and watched the contents spill soundlessly out. The gray dust swirled momentarily in the water and then vanished into the deep green dark. I stared at that same place where the ashes had vanished. Not breathing or speaking or counting the seconds. The breakers beyond cascading in the distance. Until the boatman’s cough snapped me back to existence, and I rose, ready to pile back into the skiff.
But upon crossing the barge, something caught my eye. A feral oyster clung to one of the pylons. Stooping, I twisted it off, studying the thing in my hand. It was no bigger than my palm, gnarled and edged with excess shell growth. The tendrils to which it had anchored itself curled in the air like tiny wisps of hair. I asked the boatman for his knife, which he tossed across to me. Placing the blade between the two halves, I pried the oyster open, staring at the glistening gray mass inside, so soft and pale beyond that jagged exterior. And when I raised it to my lips and sucked it down, so sweet.
Jordan Escobar (he/him) is a writer from Central California. He is a 2022 Djanikian Scholar in Poetry and the author of the chapbook Men With the Throats of Birds, forthcoming with CutBank Books. He currently teaches at Emerson College and Babson College.