Chapter Text
16.
“What’re ya always scrawling there, boy?” a hoarse voice called from a near distance. Looking up, Gilbert Blythe found Willie Perkins sitting on his bunk, with his great, white beard coated with coal dust, face covered in grime, and eyes hollow and blue. Despite the places that he had managed to visit these past few weeks, anxieties continually overcame his rationality, with the furnaces continuously roaring, and the unsteady pitching of the vessel causing a number of men to oust untimely gagging. This experience was far from the ideal adventure that he would dream of when he was a kid, that's for sure and certain. The residual heat from the boilers troubled his few hours of sleep, not to mention how the mixture of malodors not only was a constant presence in his wake but was now a reoccurring awareness that would continue to haunt him in his sleep. Nevertheless, despite the inhumane environment challenging the veracity of “real men,” his first time slipping to the deck brought about the boost that his father would often state from his own adventures. On the deck, with the great expanse of the sea within his reach, Gilbert Blythe felt the comforting wisp of a winter chill. He felt the distant embrace of home, but today, it caused him to be more restless, for he was alone on Christmas day, with no one and nothing to help soothe his pain, so he scribbled and scribbled and scribbled, but Willie Perkins brew a storm, causing him to snap in anger to the world.
“What’s it to you?”
“Now, now,” Willie Perkins returned in surrender, “Don’t mean no offense, eh? Just curious is all.” Gilbert Blythe had constructed the guise that would allow him to accommodate every single expectation of his rotating crewmates, but now he found that he needed a friend, so he brought down a few walls, and allowed a conversation to uplift his spirits. Anyone would do, even quiet Willie Perkins who he had only exchanged two words to before today.
“Letters. I write letters to—to people I know. My father said it helped him cope when he was in the military, so I adopted the habit,”
“You sending them off?”
“No,”
“Why not?” Gilbert felt the tears burning his eyes when he thought of the immediate answer to the question. Because nobody would read it. Because they were all rotting bags of flesh, left forgotten to the world as the still and the silent consumes their very existence until they were nothing but consigned to oblivion. Gilbert turned his back on Willie Perkins, and tried to stifle his tears from falling, for not even the smallest hint of snivel should be free for anyone to know. Willie Perkins knew nevertheless. Instead of telling the boy off by saying that crying was for sissies, and that “real men” would never sulk over their journals filled with feminine bents, Willie Perkins narrated a story.
“I have a wife, see? Name’s Clara—very beautiful. We had a horrible first few years, see? We got married fast ‘cause I got her pregnant when we were just sixteen. We were foolish kids, very foolish, but well she loved me, and I loved her, but she wasn’t—she was a very sad girl. After our first—a daughter named Susan—that one’s as beautiful as her mother—after our first, we tried to get back on track, yeah? We never did, of course, but we managed, but a few years back, Clara got worse. Her sadness, I—well, her sadness grew wild. So with Susan, my two boys, Pat and Ed, and Susan’s own Nellie, we tried to help, but—.”
“Is she—,” Gilbert whispered softly, his back still turned from the older man. Despite the unremitting growl of the heater, Willie Perkins was able to hear him and breathed his response in a similar tone.
“I left a few days after she died. Clara was my—we went through a lot together, yeah? But a life without her? Where I can’t follow her? I just—,”
“Your children—.” Gilbert sat up, with a trail of tears drying from his cheek, but he quickly brushed it off upon hearing the multiple footsteps of men climbing down the bunker. Willie Perkins continued all the same.
“Haven’t heard from them in six years. Must think I’m dead, and rightly so,”
“You’ve never written to them?” Willie Perkins coiled up in his bunk, trying to stifle his sobs, but failing miserably. The men who arrived a short while ago were fortunately too engaged in catching up with their sleep, so as long as the man did not bawl out his woes, they left him to cry alone in the Yuletide undisturbed. Gilbert waited until the older man’s tears had gone dry, but found Willie Perkins subjected in his own inconsolable grief, so he laid his weary head in the stiff pillow, and closed his eyes, for sleep was the only reprieve powerless preys of malaise can achieve.
In the following days, Willie Perkins continued his previous practice of barely exchanging two words to Gilbert Blythe. They would diligently feed the furnaces, and their insatiable appetite for coal, where clouds of incandescent fuel motion the vessel to forward. Yet, upon reaching the shores of a seaport in Maine, Willie Perkins snatched the boy after they have finished their tasks for the afternoon, and led him to a desolate peak overlooking the falling of twilight.
“I need your help, boy,” Willie Perkins started, causing Gilbert to fright over the possibility of what men could do. He heard some stories of seafarers’ disputes, making the ocean the best accomplice for whatever feat, but upon hearing the following words, he felt his heart grow steady—warm even. He felt his heart grow warm for what seemed like the longest time. “I need you to help me write a letter to Susan, and Pat, Ed, and little Nellie,”
“Of course.” Gilbert smiled with a sincerity that he thought would be gone forever—together consigned in oblivion with his father, but here he was, with his heart warm, and his smile sincere, aiding to mend the circumstances brought by the misgivings of another, while helping him—in a way, to mend his own qualms. “What do you want to say?”
“I want to go home.”
Willie Perkins, with his great, white beard still coated with coal dust, his face still covered in grime, and his eyes still hollow and blue, curled up like a boy—a sad, lost boy, and spoke of his self-condemnation, howling it to the wind and sea. Shadows tinted the sky and argent beams convene, but with the faraway streak of the setting sun, Gilbert Blythe recorded every word that exposed the six years of inconsolable grief like an evensong of contrition calling for the grace of sanctification to welcome him home.