The Origin of Waves Read Free

could follow the announcement of Psalms at matins and at evensong, and then find them in the red leather-bound Psalter; times in Scouts,cadets, Harrison College, a first-rate school for boys also, and only, and for turning us into barristers-at-law, and doctors, and priests to replenish the Anglican church, and secondary school teachers at our old school and college; for early, forced marriedhood, if girl friends were made pregnant by an error of youth and passion; and for university. Canada for me, because my money was too short to stretch across the Atlantic Ocean on a boat and go to Oxford; and Amurca for John, because his ship-working uncle was now docked and hiding in Brooklyn, for ten years, among the waves of other daring, risk-taking men, and was safe between the waves of the Stars and Stripes …

 
    I am walking in the snow now. The snow is deep. And my legs are heavy from pushing aside the tiring snow, which the plough that passes beside me is barely able to do; and I feel I am walking in frozen water. I have not remembered to take my shoes to the shoemaker to cover the hole in the middle of the left sole. So many things that I plan to do, late at night, and the night before, and put them down in diaries, and I forget them all, in this clenching and undying snow and cold, when morning comes. And I am slipping. I am moving one heavy foot no match for the cold leaking through my left sole; moving one foot at a time, at the same pace as the old blackened sail I used to see far out at sea, on that same beach wherewe sat, John and I, forty-fifty years ago, counting the steamers and the Canadian lady-boats and inter-island schooners which brought strangers and thieves, whose language was French and broken English, and “pahweemangoes” and bananas and nutmegs, weaving through the string of pearls and water surrounding us, to our shore. It is about eleven o’clock now, a time when there would be sun above my head; but here there is no sun overhead, and today, in December, almost noon, it feels as if it is night. Time in this city has made this walking sail old and worn and tattered, so that when the wind is cold and strong as it is today, holes in the sail you can put your fist through appear; and the wind can go through them, and delay the motion and the speed of arrival. But I am going nowhere in particular. I have no destination. I have no hour of an appointment; for the sail that gives me movement is patched with the words of an old song, in the voice of a woman. I can hear her voice now, whenever I walk these streets in winter … walking and seeing a light shining. When I walk there is no light. I can’t even remember the words … something about being released, being released any day. Any day now, I hope to be released from this snow. I walk and people are passing me by, and I say hello, as I have been taught to do, back in the island, but still I can see nobody waving back hello, for my eyes can only look at you … Lang … It is not an ordinary face that I look out for, as I walk these streets.
    This snow I am walking in now is anticipated and wished for with fierce resolution every December, just before Christmas, when I wish and pray and plan and curse and vow that this Christmas will be the very last, when I dream it is going to be my last. And I have conversations of reproof with myself, for having remained amongst its whiteness for so long, so many winters, all these forty or fifty years; and still I find myself today, this afternoon in December 1996, walking in the same snow, on the same lonely street which remains clean for the short lifetime of its whiteness, a second after the snow hits the pavement.
    I say to myself on the twenty-sixth of December every year, as I have been saying for forty-fifty years, “I am going back home, I am going back home, I am going back home,” recalling the three times written in a legal warning.
    And then myself says to me, “You’re damn right! You