Great Granny Tate

 

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The young girl and the sea.

Nothing was happening. Not even the near constant chirp of finches broke the silence to marked the passage of time.  Anna Tate, 32 days and 9 hours short of her fourteenth birthday, sat in an old dry wicker chair and felt the breeze that rocking through hot, still air made on her face.   On the glass table before her sat a lone, weary silver tray, its once handsome etchings long traded for memory. Clear droplets meandered down the outside of tall glasses perched on the tray. Moisture pulled and teased an August Georgia afternoon.  The cut-crystal ice bucket held a dozen loose cubes already loosing their fight to survive.

Anna loved this place in a way she did not fully understand.   As long as she could remember, summer meant being packed off to Nana Tate's house for at least part of the time. Her warmest, strongest memory's were born here, waiting for her return.   The past few summers, her parents simply dropped her off.   Straightaway, Anna felt better and more on her own. More self-reliant here, with all normal routines on hold.  Under her Nana's watchful eyes that never intruded or warned her they instead said; "Go ahead. Try. It is safe to try".  This year for the first time, Anna's parents were allowing her to take the six-hour train ride north back home by herself.   Her great-grandmother's house was something over 180 years old. Built by her great-grandfather's own hands when he was the age she is now.  Everything about it said home. The way it felt inside, it's creaks and sighs, the smell of the place.  It had that timeworn feeling that said I have been here a long time and suggesting that it might always be that way.
Once you get a place like that inside you, the world is a little less lonely.   And your place in it a little more securely anchored.

 To Anna, the world just seemed so much easier to understand rocking on a 140-year-old porch looking out over the trees that were standing there before the house was born.   She sipped her drink, condensation trickling over her fingers. The glass, like everything else here, was old. Vintage, impossibly thin.  The shadow of a gold rim the glass wore in its youth still showed in broken shadows, that refused to be lost in time.

Greta "Nana Tate" was nearing her one-hundred twelfth, well, one-hundredth-something birthday; She never did have a good fix on the exact date she arrived in her father's hands in the family's kitchen. For 100 something, she was still very alert. Slowed by age, true, but she seemed in harmony with the house. They fit each other.  Old doors that peevishly stuck for others opened at her knowing, measured touch. The floors, crafted by decades of footfalls, showed where she most often stood.  Anna would sit and listen to her great-grandmother's soft, steady voice tell tales about the family and of life long ago.

Of everyone in Anna's life, it was her "Nana Tate" that seemed to know her best. Maybe it was because she did everything so slowly, with such care and attention. She even listened slow. Maybe it was that Nana Tate saw something in her great-grand daughter's eyes that others missed. She knew just what it was. It was fear.  She knew someplace Anna had seen it, smelled, tasted it in her mouth, and whatever it was, it had left its mark on the child. A light mist over too young eyes. Nana Tate had seen it before. She knew fear came in so many different packages wrapped in failure and success but mostly dressed as the unknown.  Nana Tate suspected from her age, it was fear of onrushing adulthood, a time when you start to define yourself and let the world see you for what you are. It takes a kind of courage, like learning to walk.  It's scary and you fall down a lot.  In trade, your world becomes infinitely larger. Perhaps in time, when she was ready, she will tell someone what put fear in her eye, Nanna Tate thought. Then Nana Tate let that thought pass as well.

The pair sat, sipped lemonade, and chatted. Nana Tate talked about her own life as a child. How she had lived in a time when Americans lived in wooden homes with dirt floors and no running water, to a time when people were living up in outer space. Nana Tate pointed an arthritic didgit upwards.  A throwback to a time when if you talked about space to someone you almost needed to point up.   Anna noticed the way when Nana Tate spoke of the past.  The tone was not: what a burden it was, rather what a wonder it was and how far we have come. To Anna it felt like a burden fetching water to drink or chopping wood to be warm or cook. Instead, Nana Tate spoke of how thrilling it was for her watching father driving up the rutted dirt driveway in a Model T. The first automobile she had ever seen.

"The sound and smoke really upset the horses," she said. "Maybe they knew it was a bad idea," she added with a smile.
"The way daddy bounced around in that thing, he was holding onto it like the man on a flying trapeze." Nana Tate's southern accent so warm, thick and buttery. Her words had to swim through summer air to reach Anna's ears.

"I was 13 years old, 'bout your age," she started again, easing back into her wicker chair. Lowering herself until just inches above the seat before letting gravity gently land her. "My parents sent me to school all the way across the ocean in Europe to study for two whole years. Abroad, they called it." Her accent stretched the word out making it a long journey. "I had never spent more then one night ever away from home." Nana Tate paused, again. Her eyes looking off into some distance for a moment before coming ashore again to meet Anna's. "This was going to be for two years, to live with some cousins I didn't know I had, all just to go to school. I'd be all on my own."

Anna let that thought sink in. Felt the weight those words held for her. On my own.

"I was plenty afraid. I wanted my Father to at least take the trip with me."

Anna listened, thinking.

"Uh? Nana! Why not just refuse to go?"  Anna thought

Greta's voice brought her back from her question. Also answered it.

"Affording me this trip, this chance to learn, meant even my mother was forced to take in extra work. They both wanted this for me. I didn't fight them. I was afraid but." Nana Tate stopped shifting slowly in the chair, slowing her words, "you can't lay down to your fears."  She said looking at Anna.  "Can't let them push ya round."  Nana said.

When her great-grandmother talked to her like this, it was not like the commands of a parent, "Wash your face, make your bed." Nana Tate mostly shined her light back upon herself. This was the way she had lived each day.

In the yard around them, afternoon insects reveled in a Mardi Gras of the very small that marks being deep into summer in the deep South.

"Best to lean into fear and challenges." Nana Tate grinned, half bearing her teeth in mock battle.  Always that smile waiting just under the surface.

Anna was already wrapped up in the story. She thought of herself in that position, forced onto a ship and taken away. No cell phone, no iPod, no Nintendo DS. Had they even invented cable back then? Anna wondered.

"Not any other option, really. I knew they wanted this for me. To tell the truth, it seemed an awful fuss just to go to school," Nana Tate said, weaving a path of words and pauses.

A cold fat drop of condensation landed on Anna's leg, snapping her from the world long ago. Taking a measured sip from the glass that was still a little large for her hands, she placed it back on the table. Careful to place it atop the wet ring that was its home, its place in the world.

 "I did my best to be brave. I was going to get to Europe by ship, and that was very exciting to me." The joy of it still fresh in her words.

"Soon enough I was being introduced to the Captain, with a white beard and a white coat, a wrinkled face, and eyes cut so deep, I could hardly see their color." Nana Tate looked far off again. Then her smile returned.  "He looked like a giant to me. But a gentle one." He smiled and shook my hand.  I was told he was my great-uncle but I had never seen him before.  He bent down further when I smiled, I had been getting little toys and gifts since I was a lil' girl this was the first time I  met the one that sent them.  He took me up into a giants hug"

Another short pause and a warm, far off smile. "More then a hug, He closed his arms and I vanished," she said. Ever the story teller.

"Lost at sea," she added. Barely above a whisper.

 "He walked us around his ship, showed me my cabin and my bunk : looked small in there."  "He showed us the dinning hall they called a mess." The word mess in Nana Tate's southern accent was stretched and mashed until she pressed the sounds through her teeth to say it. Her father and the Captain walked together, the Captain who was married to Greta's aunt, always had doted on her like a grandchild, sending her trinkets and books he discovered in his travels around the world. She was traveling as his guest.

From the first vibration of the motor turning screws under her feet, Greta Tate began to lose her fearful feeling and began to take in the magic of life at sea. Behind her lay her present life, quiet and safe but ordinary. Ahead of her lay the unknown that meant adventure and a fresh uncertainty.  The farther away the land got, the more at peace she felt. Not totally at peace. It took two whole days before she was able to walk atop the straight lines of the boards laid into the deck. Putting one foot directly in front of the other, touching heel to toe as she walked.

Greta found the tastes and smells of the food in the mess so different from the blander food she ate at home. She tried it all. Pineapples and pomegranates. Yogurt. Olives. Fresh-caught fish. This was not a passenger ship, it was a freighter. But the cook, a merchant marine's son of a merchant marine who could have chosen a job at any fine restaurant in any city in the world, preferred the cramped, constantly moving little corner of the ship that was his place in his world. Just large enough to fit all he needed, just small enough for him to be master of every inch of the place. It was an unexpected and much appreciated perk for the men who chose the tiring, monotonous, lonely life of a sailor. Greta would spend time watching him chop, measure, and prepare the crews meals.

Once she had gotten used to being below decks in the deep of the ship, she loved it as much as on deck. The ride was quite different when she could not see outside and was much closer to the waterline. Pitching and rolling felt exaggerated. Down there she could hear and feel the ship working. It was always warm. Greta could smell the engine's oily sweat and feel its hot breath as it puffed and pushed the ship along.

The air was warmer still in the small galley, where bowls of colored powders and seeds filled the metal shelves. Greta watched the cook dip in his large fingers, tips coming out tinted a deep rusty red, and carefully sprinkle some unknown spice into tonight's dinner, tasting as he went, dipping a fat pinky and sucking it clean. As she sat there watching him work one day he said. "You want to look or would ya like to learn something? No one just stands about in my galley." So Greta started her life as a cook by peeling potatoes, shucked corn, learned to chop perfect little square pieces of tomato with a knife and mince onions without shedding a tear.  Take apart a chicken or pig learning what she had been eating all her life knowing it better.  For Greta it was an introduction to a life-long relationship with food and experimentation. She blushed with pride when a crew member enjoyed something that she had a hand in creating. Cookie also served as the ships doctor. "If I can stitch stuffing into a duck's ass I can stitch, up your arm" was the response he growled if anyone questioned his qualifications.

Each morning at breakfast, the Captain brought a chart to the table and let Greta mark the previous day's progress something she looked forward to greatly. She could see them marching slowly across the white paper sea of lines, numbers, and letters on the chart. Last night, he showed her, they had passed under the second letter "C" in Atlantic Ocean. The Captain would report how far they went, how fast and direction they traveled, currents and how deep to the ocean floor was below them. For Greta, this morning ritual was best on the mornings he would leave out some crucial bit of information and she would get to quiz him. The Captain often did not include the depth in the briefing, knowing she could not help herself but to ask. When she did, he would smile at her and say, "No human has reached the bottom in these here waters, Missy," in his best old-man-of-the-sea voice. This never failed to thrill her.

                                                                 ***

"It made me feel like an explorer," she said. "Felt like I done something kind of special just by being there." Anna understood and was enthralled, that feeling you get when you are looking at something for the first time in a new way. When a discovery becomes part of you and in some small way changes who you,  were going to become before that moment.

"When the sun went down the sea became black as ebony." Greta looked at Anna. Sensing her waiting. "That far out at sea, if the sky is clear at night, there is more star then sky. It almost wants to be daylight but the blackness is too powerful. So it is like daytime with a coating of darkness."

This thought struck Anna. Like life. Daylight with a sprinkling of darkness.

At night, Greta would stand watch with the Captain, his eyes cast to the sky. The Captain talked to the stars. But Greta only was listening.

"Out here they are your maps. If you can read them, they will get you home," the Captain said pointing up. "Because the ship is ever moving, the sky changes each night."

The Captain told her how sailors sang songs to one constellation as it set in the southwest and then a new song to the next constellation rising in up the East from the black line of a moonless sea. It was always amazing to Greta how the sea changed. One day it was flat, sun glinting off it like a friend inviting you to lie on your back in her vast blue arms. The next day it lashed at everything, angry and petulant, bent on revenge for some unnoticed slight, doing its very best to make her sick or knock her down. As the days dragged on, the magic of being at sea had lost some of its sheen to her.

"One night as I slept in my cabin," continued Greta, "The Captain sent a purser to wake me and tell me he wanted me up on deck on the double. The ship was cold and  all but the chug, chug, chug or the engine, kind of quiet. All the activity of the day bedded down. Still I wanted to know what was so important that I had to see in it the middle of the night." Another short pause. "I was up on the bridge before I noticed I was still in just my bed clothes." Nana Tate added this with a note of modesty in her voice that was not fully lost on Anna but not fully understood either. Like some relic of a bygone age. 

The Captain's eyes fixed out on the sea but he handed her a long coat that was so heavy she had to shift her feet to keep from being dragged over. The Captain said in a hushed voice, "I called you up on deck, young Miss, so you can witness one of the most extraordinary events a person can have while at sea. The passing of another ship." He pointed on the black horizon. Nana Tate took a breath.

 "You could see the horizon even at night." Nana Tate said. "It was that flat line that turned the stars off. Even in the darkest night, you could look out and see a long, smooth line where there were no more stars. I followed his finger out, and, there, far off on that black line, it looked like a tiny star had landed on the water. The star got bigger and bigger. I fixed my gaze on it, letting my eyes tear in the cold air before I would blink. Afraid I might lose sight of it. Soon I could see the light reflected back on the water as the star moved closer. It became huge. Its bright shape filled the night sky, blocking out some stars and washing others from the sky with her light.

The Captain pointed us a little closer to the great ship. Then he gave the command to shut down our engines and we sat silent in the water. The night was so quiet and still without the chug-chug-chug of the engines. For a long time, there was no sound at all. Then only the sound of waves crashing far off. But these waves never broke; they just kept a steady level of water slapping on water, getting louder. Then another sound, much lower, a moan, a single note. That sound made the water rumble and our now very little boat trembled at its master's feet." Nana Tate smiled.

It was thrilling. Anna could picture her Nana Tate as a little girl running out on deck to get a better view of the ship. She could see herself, head craned back, as the ship passed them. Far, far up happy tiny passengers waved down at her, their voices pushed by wind and half drowned by prop wash.  She swore she could hear music playing as it passed.

"I watched the water all in motion around our tiny metal island. All was movement and shuddering. The ship passed us, and the sounds of a silent nighttime at sea began to press its weight on us. The Captain looked down at me. "You saw history tonight, Miss. That is the R.M.S. Titanic off on her maiden voyage to New York"

"I didn't understand then, but you just never know when you are going to get to see something important. You have to keep your eyes open and not miss the important things as they pass. Some moments that you miss will hold onto you as long as you live." Nana Tate let all that settle inside Anna for a moment.

"Truth is, sometimes there is only that moment, that day. Take nothing for granted, child. Each day comes walking past fresh and new. When you fall asleep that night, the day should be in shreds around you. Opened, explored, loved, and used up fully.

 When she spoke of it to her granddaughter, it was just her memory laid out for Anna to examine. Free to take the bits she favored. Leaving the rest on the glass table next to the silver tray and melting ice.

Copyright © 2011 J. V. Wilder. All right reserved