Maine Character Energy by Sarah Parke

Author:Sarah Parke [Edited by Sarah Parke]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rogue Owl Press
Published: 2024-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

Samuel’s Hands

by Mary E. Plouffe

In his bright yellow slicker, the man who appeared at my door looked like a giant.

“A tad more’n six-foot-three” he told me sheepishly when I asked, but his shoulders spanned my doorway, and I’d have guessed another two inches at least. A quiet shyness contrasted with his physical presence, and when I asked why he’d come, he answered simply:

“I need to figure out some stuff. Ain’t nothing much harder to get at than the truth.”

Samuel was not a simple man. I’ve lived too long in this coastal Maine community to make that mistake. He arrived in overalls, if he came straight from his boat, and left his dirt-stained rubber boots at the bottom of the stairs to my office, but that meant nothing. People here lead simple lives. They are not simple people.

He sat on the edge of the couch, leaning into our talks, hands outstretched and reaching, moving in time to his story. I was often distracted by those hands: giant upholstered creatures he never put by his side. Years of lobstering and commercial fishing had weathered them, polishing the skin to burnished leather. But it was not their texture that drew me to them, it was their size. Like the swollen muscles of a weightlifter, they loomed out of proportion to his body, dwarfing even the thick arms and shoulders that stemmed them. When he cried, he needed only one hand to cover his face: thick fingers broad enough to mask both eyes while his palm cupped his chin. He sat rolling side to side; wounded sobs escaping from behind the hand.

Sometimes he gazed at his hands, propping both elbows on his knees, and laying the palms up side-by-side ten inches from his face as though he was inspecting a fish. In those moments, the hands became a mirror, and over the months we met, I watched him find anger, sadness, and regret seeded among the calluses, embedded in the deep creases in his palms.

“My whole life, I’ve worked with these,” he mused. “Grabbed, caught, trapped, pulled. Now it seems like everything’s getting away. Seems like my final catch is going to be loss.”

And so, we talked of loss.

The loss of two sons, whose talents he supported even as they took the boys far away from the island life he loved, and the fishing that fed his soul.

“They were not mine to keep,” he said, “only to launch, but I hoped, so hoped, one might stay.”

The loss of a curly-haired three-year-old daughter whose raging virus beat out a race over winter seas to the mainland hospital on a night he can never forget.

“I hated the ocean for a while after that,” he said. “She’s a cruel mistress. The tithe she took from me that night can never be repaid.”

In time, the loss of his wife, who’d found island fishing life too small, too stifling, and once the children fledged, took wing herself. “I think she looked at me and saw all she’d lost; all the things I’d taken from what might have been.

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