What the Waves Know

For all of the moon dancers among us who grace us with their ability to swim into the magic of the world—for sharing the songs we cannot hear, the fairies we cannot see, and the dream of taking flight . . . and for those who love them

Normal kids are afraid of the dark. Skittish, I suppose, of the way it stuffs the hollow corners of their rooms with nothingness and wraps around the day like a muzzle until the clamor of the world runs quiet. I fell in love with the night after I lost my father inside it, in love with the way it folds itself over our ugliest secrets in a black lacy veil, transforming the saddest moments of our lives into little more than broken bits of light flickering overhead. After my father disappeared, I came to imagine him floating in the velvet creases of the night, watching me move through the years. I came to embrace the utter blackness stretching its arms out, hushing the world to the scratchy
eet, deet, dee
of a cricket's song wisping through the breeze so softly you can hear the floorboards sigh.

But then, I am not normal, no matter how politely people try to argue the point. I last heard the sound of my voice eight years ago when it chased my father into
the darkness. Then it was gone. And the moment that I was a kid, the real kind who skips Double-Dutch and neatly tucks teeth beneath their pillow waiting for fairies to arrive, vanished before it even fully materialized.

When I was born to Ansel and Zorrie Haywood on October 3, 1960, my parents named me Izabella Rae Haywood—Izabella for a dead grandmother I never knew; Rae for a string of light that was missing from their marriage. Put all together, I am breathing proof that for a single moment my parents were not cannibals snipping at each other's back, but one: one body wrapped around itself, one sigh let loose on the night, one author of their next chapter.

Their story began two years before my birth beneath a harvest moon, where they were dizzy with love. This according to my father. According to my mother, it was the third blood moon and food poisoning from a basket of bad clams. Given what followed, I believe her. What they did agree upon was it began in Tuckertown, Rhode Island, where seagulls outnumber people twenty to one. Really, Tuckertown isn't a town at all, just a broken-off spindle of land jutting clumsily out into the Atlantic Ocean. It does not have a market or even a school to call its own. What it does have, though, is a stall-sized post office once used as an honest-to-goodness rest stop for the pony express. And if you have your own post office, you get to call yourself a town. This is not to say the post office is the whole treasure trove of Tuckertown. There are also twenty or thirty
ramshackle cottages, four docks where lobstermen haul in their traps each evening, filling the town with a marshy stink, and one billion crooked-winged osprey scavenging for carcasses. Not much, but it's where I was born and lived the first fourteen years of my life.

My parents spent the earliest of those years sorting out a nickname that fit, because there is the name God gives you and then there's the name the whole rest of the world calls you. Late in the foggy gray of October 1961, when my first birthday rolled around, Reverend Mitchell of the Talabahoo First Congregational Church poured holy water over my head, baptizing me “Izabella Rae in the name of our Father who art in heaven.” But by then God was the only one still calling me that. My father who art on earth called me Belle, and my mother, Izzy.

Somewhere around my second birthday, sweetsy names gave way to ones of utility, and my full Christian name returned to me in a broken series of monosyllables, “Iz-a-bell-a Raaaaae!” flinging through the air with hatchet precision to chase me to my plate at dinnertime. This morphing continued until, finally, by my fifth birthday I answered simply to “Be” when my father caught me up in a hug, and “Iz” when my mother did not. In no less than five short years I had been whittled down to the weakest forms of “to be” in the English language. It is a fact I have spent a good amount of time considering.

Grandma Jo says, “Izabella Rae, every great story begins in its weakest form and builds upward from there.”

She may be right or she may be wrong about that, but lately I have come to believe that, great or lousy, in the end we are all just the caboodle of stories we leave behind. The moment you die, all those stories tumble from their basket sticky-edged, and however they clump together, there you have it. Before you even wiggle one toe in the grave people come stand around your coffin to collect them. When I die, they will cluster beside my dead body whispering, “And that thing with her father . . . Poor soul never was quite right afterward.” And that will be true.

On that day, those bunched-up stories are the only real thing left of any of us, and as fate would have it, most of mine began on October 3, as if God himself touched me on the forehead and said, “Izabella Rae Haywood, I give you life, and each year on your birthday that life will change forever.”

And starting on my fifth birthday, that's exactly what happened. In truth, it began two months before, in the summer of 1965. It is one of the only moments with my father that remains whole in a bucket of bent and broken memories, and it was the day I came to know Yemaya.

That August was the kind of hot which leaves you chewing grit between your teeth, “turning us all into the devil's dust mop,” Grandma Jo would say. And this particular Sunday was roasting everyone into a state of crankiness, especially my mother, who stood barefoot in the drive, hair pulled up into a loose twist with one hand wedged on the pointy tip of her hipbone. Small damp
tendrils clung to her neck, making her wiltedness almost beautiful, as if the heat were melting all her sharp edges.

“I cannot believe the two of you are going to spend a day like this cooped up in a truck for three hundred miles just to go splash around in Potter's Creek. It's got to be a thousand degrees out here.”

My father chuckled, throwing an extra reel of fishing line on the front seat of our old Jeep. “It's only five hundred degrees in the water. Come on, Zo!”

“She's going to miss church.” My mother tilted her head at him. “And Sunday school.”

“Sunday school.” He chortled. “God's country is out there. He's too damn smart to waste a day like this with a bunch of stuffy old Bible-mongers! Go throw some shorts on and come splash with us. I know just where to find him!” When my father grinned dimples bore deep into his cheeks in a Robert Redford sort of way that melted the whole world into happiness, only he had darker hair and soft gray eyes that glimmered with mischief. My mother called it his get-out-of-jail-free card.

“You're impossible!” My mother dropped her hand from the crest of her hip, shaking her head with a smile. I thought, not for the first time, that my mother must be the most stunning woman in the world in my father's company.

“I try.” He kissed her full on the lips until she pushed him away, clonking him gently on the head with the back of her hand.

Not knowing what to do, I busied myself with Malibu Barbie, whom I'd dressed in Ken's camouflage trousers and tall rubber boots. The ski pole I'd stolen from my Ski Queen Barbie and given her to use as a fishing rod was bent from where I'd tied a piece of thread to the tip, with a lipstick-red stiletto shoe as a hook. I sent it spinning around and around, watching the shoe fly in circles.

“Come on, Zo. Come with us.”

“Ansel Jacob Haywood, you are stark raving mad if you think I am going to lock myself in that tin can in this heat.” She glanced at Barbie's heel swinging in the air.

“All right, but if I do the catching, you do the cooking!” He laughed, plopping a floppy hat on my head. Two minutes later, we were spinning backward out of the drive with my mother frozen up like a statue on the pavement watching us go. Through the rear window, I could see her forehead pinch into a furrowed brow and for a second I thought she might run right after us, but she didn't and I watched her shrink to the size of a spring tick until the truck veered left down Route 95, the droopy rim of my straw hat bouncing along to “C.C. Rider” on the radio.

My father was one-eighth Narragansett Indian and seven-eighths mystery. The fact of the matter might not be important if it weren't for the Nikommo, which only descendants of the Wampanoag nation can hear. When I was little, with the wind whipping and whining at my windowpane, sending my quilt over my head until my knuckles ran white, my grandfather would dig me free
from the folds of fabric with a chuckle.
It's just the Nikommo chattering to their mother, the moon.

I had been raised with the Nikommo and knew the tiny woodland sprites of the Narragansett passed their evenings whispering to anyone who would listen, telling them where they needed to go—leading a famished hunter to a wild boar, a person lost among the fir trees back to his trail.

It is the right of the Nikommo to guide the land; it is the right of the moon to control the tide. Close your eyes and eavesdrop. In the morning, you will tell me what they were rattling on about.

It was no use. No matter how hard I listened, I could never make out what they were saying, where they wanted me to go. But my father heard them all the time, even if he never called them by name. The world was always chattering to him, calling to him from all four corners without notice or apology. And today, it had beckoned him three hundred miles from home to fish for salmon, although given the chance for a do-over I believe he might have thought better of it and pulled that floppy hat right off my head and sent me to the church ladies. Because I decided on our very first catch that I loved fish. I do not mean fried up with lemon rind over a campfire as he intended, but alive and swimming freely about my ankles, nipping and tickling my toes.

The epiphany struck while I was standing in Potter's Creek, sixty miles north of the New Hampshire border.
There we were, up to our underpants in water when—
Boom!
It hit me and I understood straight down to my toes why God spent his Sundays knee-deep in water instead of inside some stuffy church toppling with women in dusty hats stinky from mothballs and old Mr. Pontell snoring from the back pew.

Dancing with the current, throngs of salmon leapt in and out of the water like one hundred and one silver needles pulling trails of pink ribbon in their wake, stitching a path up the rocks, shattering the surface into slivers of mirror zipping through the water and reflecting all the colors of the world on their backs.

“Be! Look!” My father's voice ratcheted up three decibels in the way it always did when he was on a mission nobody else in the universe understood but me. “My God, they're beautiful. Have you ever seen anything so goddamn beautiful?” He flicked his finger across the rapids until a thousand water pearls skittled over the face of the creek. “Do you hear her?”

“Who, Daddy?” I reached for his hand, stumbling in the current, but he was wading in deeper to listen and I was afraid to follow. This was the story of us. My father slipping away to the Nikommo and me tripping after him—desperate not to be left behind.

“Yemaya. Do you hear her? She's calling them home.” Glancing over his right shoulder, he studied me for a second. “You do, don't you? You hear her.” The statement bounced off the water as fact and I listened with all my
might, but just like with the Nikommo, the words he could hear were swept away in the wind and all I could hear was the
shush
of water and splash of salmon.

Giving him a nod, I teetered in the tide, trying to find solid ground as he turned back to stare at the creek. The water rushed over my toes, foamy whitecaps skating along top.

“My grandmother saw her once when she was about your age, said she was the most beautiful thing in the world. Mother of all mothers, protector of children. Long black hair, just like yours. Eyes the color of a perfect storm. Just like yours.” He glanced at my face as if trying to force the pieces to fit, and for a moment I knew he didn't recognize the way they came together. It wasn't the first time I had witnessed the current at work in his eyes, tugging him one direction and then the other until he was left spinning like the foamy whitecaps at my ankles. “If you watch, really watch, just below the water where the sun sparkles off the rocks, you just may see her. And if she's in a good mood, she just might toss you one of her magic pebbles and it will bring you good luck forever.” The wish pressing up against his words was hard to ignore.

He stretched a hand out to me, and I tried to go to him, I truly did, but the current swept me one direction while my father motioned me the other. Before I knew what was happening I was pulled down hard against the rock I'd been propped up on, sliding down the slippery
edge. Down into the water. Sailing away with Yemaya and her million silver salmon.

I can't say how long I was under before I felt my father's hand cuff around my wrist and yank me back. “Don't let go, Be. Don't let go!”
Don't let go. Don't . . . let . . . go.

And then we were on the stony edge of the creek bed, me hiccupping out water, my father holding my small hand in his like a robin's egg while he dabbed at the cut above my brow with his shirt.

At first I thought the blood had trickled into my eye, blurring up the world until it tottered upside down, but that wasn't it. An enormous salmon danced into the air, its chrome gills billowing out into tiny angel wings fluttering it toward the clouds in exactly the same way I imagined a person's spirit might break free of its body and soar toward heaven. Long as an arrow, it shot into the day and I swear the morning sun looped into a halo around it.

“Daddy, look!” I squealed, waving my free arm toward a ring of ripples ten feet in front of me and forgetting all about the gash over my eye. I jumped up and down, swaying to keep my balance in the absence of my father's hand. It's a sensation I have yet to grow used to.

The dimples poked in at his cheeks. He picked me up and tossed me into the air before splashing me back to the stream. Lifting his rod from its sheath, he let go a low whistle and cast it forward. The tiny yellow anchor at the tip of his line zipped through the morning and plopped into the water with a small splash. As though not a thing
in the world had happened. As though I hadn't nearly died trying to bridge the distance into his world. I could not have known then that bridge may as well have been the River Styx, could not have understood that once you crossed, you could never come back alive.