1 - An Old Personal Letter

The Sound Is The Sailor’s Laughter

A Novel

For Andrew

e-book: “The Sound Is The Sailor’s Laughter”

The Sound Is The Sailor’s Laughter By Corinne Devin Sullivan

ISBN 979-8-9909558-0-6

© Corinne Devin Sullivan. 2024. All rights reserved.

Publication made by: CORINNE DEVIN SULLIVAN BOOKS

Published in the United States of America, in November of 2024.

Chapter 1: an old personal letter

An old, personal letter from some time ago in 1997…

Dear Floyd Ladd,

I am writing this letter to you with your kind advice in mind that we should stay in touch for the rest of our lives. It was like ambitiously sneaky of me to talk to you at your movie premiere like that. I sort of introduced myself because I kind of was starstruck. I hate myself when I do that. 1997 is almost over so I jumped. I want this to be the best year I have ever had before I am 17.

You seem so vulnerable. I know this will be a vulnerable letter, too. It’s not right for me to apologize because I feel that vulnerability is sometimes worth achieving. 

I do appreciate knowing the company chose someone other than me. I am appreciative you listened at all and how you asked everyone to give me a fair try. You treated me like a real actress with at least a bit of skill. I really am “forthright” as you wrote. But if there’s any possibility, at all, that I can be part of your next movie it would show me I am still worth something!  I am not open to the court of personal opinion. I don’t want anyone to ruin me with their idea of what I should be just because I look lonely or mad. I am close to becoming an adult so I can see how things change with time. I need to deal only with men and women who are dedicated like I am. Artistically, I am actually stating how I need to just be me. 

I remember how you said you were in the Navy. Our dad was in the Navy! I told him about your movie company and how you started it on your own in 1972. He thinks what you’re doing is hot shit!!! and he told me to tell you. 

“Meade” (everyone calls dad by our last name) left the Navy’s service, oh, back in 1968. Chief Engineer Declan Aidan Meade (our dad) has been a merchant marine ever since those good ol’ Navy days back then. Merchant Marines aren’t military. They do a lot of work for the Navy “during times of conflict”— something like that! 

Dad and I have plans to buy some stuff to film a movie with, and you probably have everything that we need to do it so Dad (Meade) has put something together, and you will probably be interested in it. I’ll print his good stuff out now, and I will send it to you with my letter. Please look inside! 

It’s going to sound like the old “father/daughter sales pitch”. I’ll be honest: I hope you want to make a movie with this. I’ll wait to hear from you about this. 

By the way, the “little man” you picked up and held for a little while is one of my little brothers, Malcom. He’s a good kid. He is making his plans to be an actor when he gets a little older. I have a lot of good people we can get for this thing inside my family to keep costs down. I hope you see fit to work with us. More on the way but you have to tell me if you like my idea, please! That’s everything I wanted to say. 

Deviously as well as sincerely-sneaky, 

Fiona (the moody one who acted like she was in trouble with the law)

What happened to be enclosed with the aforementioned letter was this here print-out…

Dad, You can write any story you want about the ocean here… CLICK “SAVE” PLEASE!!!

…as well as this here documentations and such:

Fiona, I love you honey and I wrote things for your project. Telling my stories is something special for you and me. I hope you put this away. Years from now, get it out. Read it again. Remember your old dad. 

With a lot of love,

From Dad,

Meade. 

(Hey there, sailor. Why don’t you make sure you delete our little notes off anything you send out of this house. Even if this guy handed you a fake address he still can be raking in cash hand over fist from an Arab diplomat. Kidding… Love, Meade)

Stories from my time at sea. Written for wonderful Fiona, my daughter. (header)

It was sometime back in the Eighties. I had been working on ships for the Navy over a couple of weeks. All kinds of ships are kept up all around the world to keep everyone safe from war.  I supervised engine repairs, refreshed things, and learned how to check up on any new technology, among a few other tricks of the trade.

The entire activity was classified, however. 

The US Navy generally handled our return to the States. This time, a private company was hired to take care of everything. They had us on a large airplane on a trip that began in a distant location abroad. It was something like a military airlift. It was just huge. I was completely stretched out during the first leg of the flight. I had an entire bench left only to me. The whole thing felt just like a movie.

I am a merchant marine licensed to sail as Chief Engineer on pretty much anything the ocean has to offer. I had been making fair money, but it wasn’t close to enough for what my family needed to spend during the weeks and months that I was away at sea.

It was the 1980’s and I was working on Marriage Number Two with the same woman: my wife, Aoife, was who I was flying home to. 

I had a few gifts inside my briefcase. I had picked some things up for her and for our children. I had a dress made in about an hour out of Singapore silk. The woman looked at a photograph of Aoife from my wallet. She said she didn’t need measurements. She cut and sewed the dress right away. I bought one of a similar color for our young daughter. 

At a gift shop close to my hotel I bought each of our twin boys a set of “Year of the Horse” Singapore money. These were wallets made out of imitation leather with fresh coins inside from 1978. They were certified by Singapore’s Board of Commissioners of Commerce as the real thing.  

I was content to read and sleep on the plane. I stayed flat on my back and sort of had a day-dreaming experience. I envisioned me walking through the front door to my house. My dream played in front of me just like a ten-cent movie theatre. It was going on inside my imagination. I could relax and watch things go by on the movie screen inside my brain. In my mind, I just sank away. 

In there, I was walking up to our house. I had a long-necked shirt on. It was blue with an anchor stitched into the front, over the heart. That’s how I always imagined a sailor ought to get around, and the mind is a magic movie theater where I can look like anything I feel is right. Maybe, in that scenario, I had returned from Turkey, instead of the job I had finished in reality. In that ride my imagination was taking me on, I wasn’t in my forties but my twenties when I was a submarine radioman for the U.S Navy.  

I was having a hell of a good time thinking about these things. The plane was roaring as it flew. My eyes were closed. We didn’t have a stewardess. Nobody was checking in on us at all. It felt like not a soul on-board still knew I was still on the plane. There were less than thirty people on the flight, and everyone was real quiet and doing their own thing, such as reading. 

 I daydreamed about a bottle of wine under my arm and a trail of Turkish sausages, plus these real gaudy and pretty flowers, dangling from the other. And in the mind’s ten-cent movie theater, Aoife came plowing out of our house. She was laughing and singing like that old movie The King And I with tears of happiness. And she just comes flying out the front door at me. The whole thing happens on a summer morning, back in Seattle, where I’m from. 

At times, the plane was sinking or jumping. It was not going to be a smooth ride back. Eventually, the plane came down. We were on the tarmac for only a minute or two. No one wanted us to deboard so I found my bag in the storage compartment and got a box of granola bars out of it for everybody to eat. Up we went again, headed to somewhere in Spain. The head smelled so bad it had us reeling whenever anyone opened the thing up to use it.

 I rested on the bench. I thought about getting home and taking a load off. My head was rested on Middlemarch, by George Eliot, which was a good book. I had carried it with me on the voyage to finish reading it. There wasn’t another volume for me to grab next. I had nothing else around to get into. 

I rested my head on my leather jacket and just closed my eyes. I dreamed about some big-time story as if it was my life. In it, Aoife would be endlessly running towards me, and smiling, inside my mental picture show, over and over. And I would hold onto her with both of my hands just to squeeze her tight enough, like a big hugger would do. Sinking deep into the dream, I sort of fell asleep. With irritation, I  couldn’t help but tell Aoife the thing I can’t: “You spent my entire pay in a single day at Nordstrom and for your hair. Do you know how it feels to work all day?”

I fell forward. I opened my eyes. The plane was jumping. Messages from the cockpit screeched in the compartment from a box placed on the side of the hull. I could see that I needed to buckle up. There wasn’t anyone telling us to do it. I did it anyway. The other people followed my example. Then the plane dropped like a machine gun bullet until we were skidding to a final stop on a nondescript runway in Spain. It was located “who-knew-where”.

The plane sat on that landing strip. I waited for it to take off again. 

I wished for Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I was on the fourth volume. It was decent reading. 

Hours passed. It was hot. There wasn’t any music playing. The pilot was behind a steel barrier. Bad smells surrounded the head if anyone went over there, and I was getting sick to my stomach. The bench gave me an achy feel. I didn’t know if I was going to see Aoife, or the children, one more time. It was a bad bout of anxiety. There was no one talking to us. I felt small, somehow, in the bureaucracy of industry. The job I had been on left me too needy. There was menace, and there were business interests preying on the Navy what with this crazy trip taking every stop it needed to keep the costs down. 

I waited.  

To ease my mind, I laid back down and put my head onto Middlemarch like some kind of square pillow. It had become too much to dream about anything nice happening. I could say I felt too stuck in one place. Maybe I was through with it. Perhaps, I didn’t want to make it home, anyway.

The plane had come down onto a strip at a small, Spanish airbase that was supposed to be outside of Madrid. We had no way of knowing. There weren’t any cell phones back then. The internet didn’t come out until the Nineties. I had not a way to find out straight information. I had tried to ask around so, when I was attempting to rest, one sailor on board touched the back of my hand. I opened my eyes. He had some information from the pilot. The plane was supposed to be stopped forty-five minutes more and then get going again.

I sat up again. I was scheduled for another flight after this one landed in San Diego. The final one would take me back to New Jersey which was sort of doubling back the way I had arrived. That was the route the private enterprise people had put together for me. And they didn’t mind adding one more stop midway in Texas. 

No one wanted to ask the people outside to let us get out. It was probably better to remain on the plane. The one reason to deboard would to make a quick phone call to Aoife, who was at our farm. Again, I closed my eyes to sleep. I hoped to ignore the smell inside the head that was really getting to me. 

Aoife was the only woman who would unabashedly tear the heart from my day, from thousands of miles away, from any port I ever called her from. I didn’t need to deboard for that phone call to take place. She did it without fear, often over a terrible phone connection. In the course of our lives together, I would arrive to port in Singapore, or Saudi, or Unimak Island, or up in Alaska, and I would beeline it right to any phonebooth I could find. Or, I stood by, like a fool, waiting for another poor soul to finish a telephone call home to his wife. None of them really seemed happy after the call. I would check in with Aoife just to let her know I was okay and that I was still alive. Thing is, no matter what terrible thing she said, she would give me a place in the world. With her saying my name after the weeks or months I had spent at sea, I felt reality real firmly and underneath both my feet. It was a truce between black and white, when things came to Aoife and I, and I constantly found myself studying our equation. 

If I called her now, the conversation would turn to the never-arriving paycheck. She dealt with that predicament every month. The first thing she needed to know whenever I called in from an international port was why the check from the company I was working for was delayed, or late, or why it had taken so long to clear at the bank. All that, and I’m in a fragile state when I am done with a job so I don’t want to mince any of my words. I can’t remember all the details about money and checks. And it would be right there that our argument often began. That’s why I didn’t dare attempt to find a phone to make any phone call back to my home. 

In our forced conversations from such strange and dangerous ports as those that encircle the globe, I cannot but can’t avoid the urge to tell Aoife off in each response to her acrid statements towards me. I find myself diving headfirst into the argument, each time, between she and I. Every angry word drains into the remainder of the conversation, messing everything up between she and I and from that moment forward.

But, at the same time, what would my life be if I wasn’t somehow always moving in Aoife’s direction? Aoife is the one woman I have fallen into a state of permanent respect for. I enjoy greeting her after a trip. I like having her with me anytime we go somewhere. We get into giggling together about presents I bring home for her. I must look like some shy kid. I feel total devotion. 

Walking in a port town in the Orient, I look for some stone or electronic gadget to give to Aoife. I’d like to find something that is more spectacular than the last gift I bought for her. When vessels take me to other countries, I look for a special present. I want her to have unique opportunities so I search the marketplaces, and I change my money, and that is how my wife is fairly respected by me. 

I fell forward again so I stood up. I needed to stretch. I walked around, and I sat back down. Then I rested back on the bench. My eyes were closed.

The plane shuddered all of a sudden. It jerked a little bit forward. Then, it stopped still. A minute passed. The place rocked back and forth a few times. Then, it moved back and forth one more time. I sat up and put my seatbelt on. I tried to read the book, but the plane continued to shake. From below, an odd noise was going rowr, rrroar, rowr. The sound came from a distance.

I looked at the others seated there with me. Everybody had a bottle of alcohol. I had a liter of vodka in my briefcase, underneath the bench. I removed it and mixed it with some orange juice another sailor gave out in plastic cups. I drank it, but it was last time because a minute later I was sicker than a dog, and the plane was still rocking from side to side. 

Time went by and, still, no one checked in. Not a soul told us we couldn’t unbuckle our seatbelts. 

I went into the bathroom, but the head was all backed up.  There was a round portal inside with the shades drawn. It was the only window I noticed. I pulled the curtain aside, looked out. We were still on the ground. and I thought we’d taken off an hour ago.  

My watch told me we had been sitting there for two hours inside that hot hot. The smell from the head was everywhere. I opened a little side door. Nobody said anything. 

It didn’t look like anyone on the flight team was ready to go. The ground was empty outside except for one person holding a machine up against a ladder that rested on the ground. He seemed to be fixing the ladder underneath our plane. There was something like a rope ladder next to me—or maybe it was a single rope set up by someone I knew to act like a ladder. 

“That’s it. I’m heading out,” I said to the guy who might be in-charge.

“Union regulations say you can’t, Meade. All the gear is stowed under those nets. Take a seat.”

It just so happened that mine was right there on top. I was able to grab hold of the suitcase handle and take it out, along with the orange juice guy’s suitcase—the person standing there, next to me. We both wanted to go.

“Thanks, Meade,” the guy says to me, and follows me off the plane.

Outside, it was hotter than anything I had experienced in Spain before. Me and the other guy walked across landing strips. Then, we had to wait at the airport’s car-park. No one was around, and we knew we had to pick up our efforts. There were a few ways to find the main public roads. We managed to call a taxi once we found ourselves a phone booth. We shared a ride to the closest airport. The driver told us it was supposed to be a quick road, but it just felt like a wasp-filled endless beltway around the middle of Spain.

We had to drive for hours. Creedence Clearwater Revival played on the radio so I asked the driver to turn things up. Later, everyone wanted me to talk submarine stories so I gave them some. 

Probably thirty dollars would have been fair to spend on the long ride, between us both. Instead, it was nothing. However, our driver was concerned, and so we both tipped him well. 

Each of us bought a first-class ticket. We ordered drinks, and I passed out. Midflight, I woke up. A woman nearby handed me The Avignon Quintet, by Lawrence Durrell, when she heard me complain. I couldn’t get it started so I handed it back. I had left my copy of Middlemarch on the military airlift, but managed to give her a short view of its plot while we were all waiting to deboard.

I arrived home to fifty beautiful acres, located riverside, in pulchritudinous New Jersey. Aoife had found our new home a few years ago. It happened when we were getting back together after our first divorce from one another. That was a dangerous time for me, financially. 

Aoife and I had been married to each other (for the first time) eight years earlier. After it, we had to get divorced and stay divorced for a long time. She had only recently agreed to get married to me, once again, the year before. 

The sale of the first home we owned was sort of a grand ending to the entire montage of our first marriage together. I see the sale of my favorite spot, in a neighborhood close to Lake Washington, as the really dramatic point of our first divorce together. It brought up the odds for all the action about to arrive under the heading of “Marriage Number Two”, clear out in New Jersey. 

There is a short film inside my mind. It unreels on the floor of my brain. I have spent hours sifting its pictures. The show is termed, “Marriage Number One”. That stretch of my life has been completely disposed of. Aoife sold the one house in Seattle I truly believed I would live forever in—live happily ever after in—and she just left it far behind. Packed up everything we had bought together, and, with our children, moved across the United States to a blueberry farm in New Jersey.

My telling Aoife she could go ahead with buying a farm in New Jersey was an important move right at the start of the second marriage. The new residence changed the landscape between each other enough for us to ensure we were both somewhat deranged. That was when we started to believe we could keep going together no matter what else happened. The challenge was there. Of course, that wasn’t the plan we talked about, but that’s how I see things now, looking back on our story together. 

I could only be certain that Aoife felt the same way I did. Strategy is a big part of her family’s mentality. She liked to tell everyone she ever met about how she was able to get through to me on an emergency phone call, when I was in Japanese waters, having recently survived a typhoon, on a four-month trip, in order to get me to pay for the new farm’s down-payment. 

The phone connection had been terrible, but I got what she was asking me for, eventually. I said, “I always wanted a farm. If you found one you like, go ahead. We’ll buy it.”

The whole place was sight-unseen for me. She bought it on the recommendation of her best friend, Sally, but Sally had never liked me all that much. 

I am a union man. The union on the West Coast actually likes me a lot, usually. When I was finally back home from that twelve-day government job, after the ordeal with the plane in Spain, the union’s secretary there made a point of calling me. I had just about gotten my shoes off, after stepping through the front door of my New Jersey-based blueberry establishment.

The representative of my shipping union was already hammering at things. He told me, “It was a landing gear problem. They had made stops that took a long time the whole way. Meade, everyone has, in turn, agreed that it wasn’t meant to be a problem. And then you chose to deboard, while at rest, inside Spain. From here on out, it’s okay for anyone to, you know, go ahead and do that, if he must depart, if he feel he needs to. But, hey, only if it doesn’t break the law, or cause trouble with passports, or with any immigration people. Those are the places they can get at you.”

“That sounds real good. Thanks,” I told the man from the union. 

After I hung up the phone, I threw all the dirty laundry from my travel bag into the washer and turned it on. Aoife was an hour away, at some club meeting with a county official. Aoife had been talking big on local politics. She might steer herself into a career in the city government if I was careful how I went about pushing that to her. 

It was good to be home again. The two-story farmhouse had a friendly feeling. It had been built in the 1800’s, but I had yet to get an exact year. My mind was at rest from the shipping industry’s red tape, and the complicated journey home. The harrows of the open sea were far away for the next six months. 

I never wait around when I see something is going bad but simply walk in a different direction. However, now that I was a family man, I had all these cute kids. I knew they would approach soon to ask questions. I had to solidify my answers all the time with these guys. I also still had a cost-heavy wife to care for, so the pressure inside my mind to get back to sea would come and go. With Aoife, I really felt a need now to squeeze into society but wondered if it would ever open.  Because of the factors at stake, I decided to try to keep things low-key that week and play it cool with our kids. 

For the most part, I was away at sea and making all the big bucks needed to cover the cost of things. My most persistent worry was how to make the family last. When Marriage Number One ended, my entire life was at stake. I begged myself not to do it again during Marriage Number Two, by mistake.

Aoife had a lot to buy. She would be gone in the city the whole afternoon. I had successfully brought in a sizeable paycheck and she was fully content, so I needed to take care of children, and so I walked outside. It was time to start enjoying being a class-act type of guy, in the “Husband” as well as the “Dad” departments. 

I washed up, and put a sweatsuit on from a voyage I was hired for last summer. The merchant marines get t-shirts and sweatsuits that go along with the vessel. The clothes have the ship’s name printed on them. Some have a picture of the ship printed on them. Wearing these on-shore made me feel like a real merchant marine who was on vacation. 

I walked to the barn. I intended to grab a bale of hay. Aoife had asked me to throw one over the fence for a horse she had bought while I was away at sea. How she was able to throw a bale over a fence every day, all by herself, was hard for me to guess. Doing that myself, and having the horse come nodding my way, the esteem of having become the owner of a fairly unproductive blueberry establishment that looked correct to all the people driving by and living in the area really filled my heart. 

During that very first week back home from sea, I found my twin boys making army camps everywhere they could. They were about ten years old so I could tell that Ben was going to be big and burly and blonde like the men in Aoife’s side of the family. Sam was smaller in stature. He had a darker shade to his skin, but he had my shade of blue in his eyes. He was handsome. Heck if they weren’t both good-looking boys. 

I waved them over. They waved back. I called over to them, but they needed to perform a variety of military procedures and I had to kick it out of there, go back to my work for Aoife. 

The blueberry farm wasn’t more than ten acres. Only a few of those had blueberries growing anything on them. 

There was a great, big, brown barn, built a long time ago, before the house, some time back in the 1700’s. There was an old-fashioned storage shed. It was built from wood the original landowners had chopped down. Three tractors from three different eras were growing rust under the coverage of the wooden bay. Much of the shed’s wood had rotted through and then, I suppose, had solidified. 

There was a small shack. It was built up along the bottom using rocks from the local river. It was built up on the top and across the roof using regular wood. The paint on the wood had been blue. Now, it was peeling in scrapes and edges that my kids could easily get ahold of. The real estate agent said that one was most likely built in 1979. 

My kids had stuck up a sign that said “Dad’s Place” outside. I unloaded every toolbox I had into there. Then, I launched into filling the little building up with screwball machinery I bought on laudable trips to every hardware store in New Jersey. If Aoife and I ventured together, we bought old-fashioned benches and things inside antique malls. Every purchase of machinery for my shop was filled with gratification of a job well-done as soon as I had moved it into place.

I walked around the corner of the barn. Next stop was the tractor shed, but you were there, picking flowers on the other side of one fence that rounded up a small pasture. Another new horse was only a few yards away. I hadn’t known Aoife went and bought all of us another horse. I thought about my wife’s bold purchase, but didn’t sweat a thing. It was Aoife’s new treasure, and I hadn’t any worries that afternoon.

I had to stop for a chat with you. I remember the conversation like it was this morning. You must have been seven years old. The twins had fooled you out of something you meant to get started up. Your mom had planned to take you into town to start a class in ballet. She got too busy with getting the twins ready for soccer camp, plus a trip for them to the model store. That put you in the outs. 

For that, you and I loaded up into the pickup truck. I had bought that small, red pickup for about one hundred bucks. On the way to your class, you said you had some big aspiration to be a farmer like me. That made me laugh. And then you were laughing hard with the joke, too. 

There was a big hole in the floorboards under the backseat of the truck, where the asphalt went racing by. We talked louder than the wheels. We were happy to drive around and show the truck off. We got you to the class right on time that day. 

Seemed like you and your brothers were involved in the types of things that me and my own brothers and my own sisters might have done back when we grew up. I was born in a shack. My parents were both children of Irish immigrants to America around the turn of the twentieth century. Back in the Forties and Fifties, my friends and I went everywhere on foot or on bikes in our neighborhood, just south of Seattle, in Washington state.  

Fiona, I watched you and your brothers and I had a feeling that all three of you were going to become merchant marines one day, after you got a little bit older. I still believe that’s true. 

Fiona, why not become a merchant marine? There are plenty of women who do. You can get a job wherever you want to take one. Why not be a merchant marine for a while until you get some living time under your belt? I know you’re going to be a big actor, so just shelf my idea, and it’s no big issue. I’m am telling you what is coming to me right now, while I type out this thing you asked me to write. Go ahead. Tell me I’m slime. 

Back during that time on the farm, when you and the twins were still so young, things were a challenge. I never could predict how things were going to turn out, but I could see one thing clear: that no one there seemed big on harvesting any blueberries. That was a fact so I tried to understand why I was standing in the middle of a blueberry farm that I was paying a big mortgage on. I spent the next few days walking through the bushes and inspecting things against advice from this man in town who owned a horticulture establishment. It was pretty clear there was a lot to do to make a sky-high splash up in blueberry heaven.

One evening, Aoife and I were standing in the kitchen. You kids were all in your pajamas. Instead of going straight to bed all three of you had stayed up late watching a movie. I had purchased the first VCR we ever owned that day. Suddenly I remembered the gifts I had bought in Singapore. They were sitting on a table in my office. I asked Ben to find them. 

The Singapore silk dress went off like a big hit with the little one. The boys thought the coins were useful. But Aoife up and dumped her silk dress in the trash. Everyone there was dumbfounded. The room went quiet. The kids went back to watching their movie.  

“I like everything you did,” I told Aoife. We were still standing in the kitchen which had been fresh-painted. The brown cupboards and the wallpaper looked overly used, though Aoife didn’t want negative talk about the establishment. 

I want to clear something up between you and I, Fiona, about that night. I wouldn’t tell anyone this other than my daughter, and I want you to know that. When I was at sea on my last job, Aoife and I had been arguing. She wanted me so stay home for a while if I was willing to use my vacation time with the union. If I did that, Aoife explained, I would certainly catch decent part-time work in one of the East Coast ports. Aoife couldn’t understand that the set-up with the roads and the arrangement with the authorities in those ports was not going to work. That was all we were saying to each other.   

“You know, you’re kind of uptight, tonight,” I told her, but Aoife turned from me. I had a little speech I wanted to make and take her into my arms. But, I couldn’t see her face. I forgot what I wanted to say to her.

When she turned around she stung me, slapping my face. I don’t know what was said, but I grabbed both of her wrists and she was still trying to hit at me, and doing it just because she got mad for a minute. She started yelling at me to let go of her wrists, and I guess I was yelling about things right back at her. But, I didn’t know what to say to her to make her stop hitting at me. 

Pretty fast, Ben rushed in with a plastic sword, or a baseball bat, and begun to hit at me, too. He got me pretty quick on the cheek. Sam was in there and you were crying in the doorway. Sounded like everyone in the room was telling me, “Don’t you hurt our mommy! Go away! Go away! We hate you! We hate you! We hate you!” 

I just about had it, then. I pushed Aoife away from me, and I walked out to the truck. It was useless. Aoife would just go crazy if I ever got mad or shouted because, once upon a time, I used to be a fighter back when I was young. I was a member of the Rainier Valley Athletic Club, and some real contenders were at that place. At bars, in my twenties and early thirties, or in drinking situations that turned ugly, I fought whoever I needed to, whenever I needed to, if the situation got bad enough. 

“Never touch a woman, or I’ll break your fists off. And don’t beat your kids, either,” is something my old man told all the boys in the Meade home. He said it more than a hundred times. Some men hit their wives back whenever their wives bit or kicked, but I am not one who would ever do that. 

I drove around the countryside and got pretty lost. That took only five minutes.  It took a while to find the way back home. By then, I felt terrible. The whole time I was asking myself if this was a nightmare. The attack came from nowhere. I was scared as hell at losing everybody I cared for. 

Later, I was in our bedroom. Aoife had quieted down. She wanted to talk because she didn’t think I took her seriously three months earlier when she made a point to tell me about a man who had been advancing on her from the town’s council. It happened right after I had departed on the last job. 

Aoife was terrified the man was going to try to take her out, again. There were big names in the county’s social calendar who liked her. She talked a lot about these people. There was a city commissioner who had stopped by when he had not asked first or been invited. Aoife talked about calling the police which I didn’t like and told her so. I let her know it would only intensify things. 

 I said, “Aoife, everything is changing for you here in your new place. You’ll learn to take it easy with the men. They’ll eventually understand. They’ll learn you mean what you say.” 

Fact is, she dressed a bit too cute for a married woman with three children. She spent a lot of time at department stores. I learned long ago to never complain because it wouldn’t do me any good. She dressed a little off, at times, and looked like a showgirl to me, at times, too.

Aoife launched into how she was sad that we had moved so far away from our families. Both her parents and mine, as well as our siblings, lived in Washington state or in California. She used to get together with all of them, all the time. She was disappointed her sisters weren’t now planning to move to the countryside, so as to be close to us.

Internally, I was forced to speak with honesty.

I said, “That’s something that both of us wanted to know, Aoife. Why did you say we needed to be on the East Coast in the first place? This is just totally insane. It’s nuts. I told you in Seattle it would go full circle, with you wanting to go home again. In point of fact, both of us bet on it, at first.”

“Both of who, Meade?” Aoife asked.

“Your dad and I both got into it on the phone, the other day. It’s just something that’s needs to be talked about.” I put my hand on hers.

We kept talking until she calmed down. After all that, Aoife and I fell asleep next to each other for a little while. When she woke, she decided to let things go. 

Aoife said to me, “I guess I can let it ride for a while. This is a done deal. But don’t you tell my mom what I say, Meade. I’m tired of you and her making fun of me. I’m here alone in this place. I am really disappointed with this set-up. There are always men around in the town or at the school who are really too bold with me, to be sure. You let it out with anyone about me being flaky, and I’ll be back home with my brothers looking after me, and you can run this place. Do you hear?” 

“You picked New Jersey. I wanted to stay or head down to San Francisco. Don’t tell me it’s me who is at fault here,” I said to her.

Then I made a promise: I was going to stick by her side, to the very end, no matter what, because she had always been there for me. However, I wasn’t going to let her run things any way she chose to, and I told her that.

A strange anger swelled up inside.

I yelled something like, “You chose to be here on your own! That choice is on you! If I choose to make something important happen, back on the West Coast or anywhere in my career, I didn’t want to be challenged by my wife every step of the way. That seems fair to me. Anyone would respect my reasoning, Aoife!”  

Money was so tight, but it wasn’t right to shout. It wasn’t even the right thing for me to say. I admit I was still mad about the time she tried to get me to go work for oil companies, last year. The fact was that we weren’t covering the mortgage, along with everything else that needed to be paid for.

Aoife started to cry. I couldn’t even touch her hand or give her a hug. Hugging me wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, for her, anymore. 

“You haven’t really ever been able to stick up for me. You act like you will. Then you blow everything off into left field. Go back to sea, Meade! You don’t care about us here, all alone. You put it on me to take care of big things. So, that’s fine with me. My choice is you get out of here, right now, if that’s all that you are planning to do, anyway!”

For more than a full day, we were in a heated fight. At the center of our anger towards each other were bills and unpaid things the kids were already planning to do. I had to get up from the argument that evening and walk. 

I strolled outside. It must have been one in the morning, but I found you, my little daughter, outside and lying on your back on top of the picnic table that rested on our front porch. 

“Hey, get to bed,” is what I said to you, but you didn’t move. 

You might have been sleeping but, when I got to the table, you were looking at me. I sat down. You turned your eyes to look up at a molasses night sky. I had to rub my eyes with my fists because I felt so bad. 

You pointed up and told me the stars were all arranged in constellations by the hand of God. 

“Who told you that?” I asked.

“You probably did,” you said. 

Then you looked kind of sad. You asked me a solid question, something like, “Dad, are you really going to go back to sea just after you just got here?”

I told you it was looking that way, and so you said, “I like camping with Ben and Sam, but sometimes I get scared. It’s better when you’re around. You can pick me up for practice, too. Otherwise, I won’t be able to go. And I will quit ballet just after I started it.”

“You want to keep good, ol’ dad here at home with you? That’s mighty nice of you.” 

You thought that was funny. Next, you told me, “Mom told me I am supposed to beg you to stay. I want you to stay for the whole month! You promised already you were going to be ready to help with the things for my big play at school. And, also, Mom said you were going to take us out to the movies. I want you to bring us all somewhere special every day.”

You got up from the picnic table, and then sat at my feet kowtowing.

“Please, please, please can we go out for a movie every day, dad?”

That’s when Aoife emerged. 

Aoife said, “You have a midnight sandwich on the counter, Fiona. Take it up to your room, please. Then, let’s get to sleep.”

“Let’s eat, pal,” I said. I took your hand and pulled you up. I had to give you some advice which was, “Don’t ever beg, okay? Never, ever let me catch you doing that. Ever. You make yourself look pretty trashy.”

Aoife said, “That’s enough. Meade, she’s young. You should watch yourself or your kids will end up talking like a sailor.”

You may remember two flashlights turning on, next to a lopsided tent out by the tractor shed. Ben and Sam came running towards the old farmhouse. They were hungry, too, and it was too cold for their camp that night. Together, everybody walked inside.

“Can we go to the movies every day?” You pleaded again, just like how your mother trained you how to talk.

You kept at it, asking me to stay until you kids all drifted out of the kitchen and everyone went to bed. Before daybreak, I already had gone. 

I flew from New Jersey straight to Equatorial Guinea to take a job on a type of ship called a Well Cleaner. It was an English vessel equipped to handle oil rigs. It operated somewhere off the western coast of Africa. The job offer I accepted turned out to be long enough to promise us months of decent pay. If I could get an extra spike of cash to Aoife by taking it, we might be more relaxed with each other the next time I was at home.

WRITTEN AND PUBLISHED BY CORINNE DEVIN SULLIVAN

ISBN 979-8-9909558-0-6 e-book: “The Sound Is The Sailor’s Laughter”

© Corinne Devin Sullivan. 2024. All rights reserved.

Publication made by: CORINNE DEVIN SULLIVAN BOOKS “The Sound Is The Sailor’s Laughter” Published in the United States of America 2024. First Final EBook. Design by C.D.S. Website: www.corinnedevinsullivan.com