Without a Name Along a Road Without a Name

"What's my name?" he thought. "What's my name going to be?"

The new job was good. Growing up on granite, he had taken to cutting concrete as if it were butter and his saw a hot knife. Concrete was nothing compared to the kind of rock that can tear ships to pieces. And so he was making money and getting compliments and he was in the market for a name. His time as Sonny Boy was done. They had called him that to put him down. But he had left that house.

He had left the sea too. The sea, however, called his name, the one he meant to have, and so on a Sunday he was walking there, along a road without a name, and he was listening, looking and listening, where Hopson Island anchored the horizon and breakers boomed along the shore.

There was something else. He knew his brothers had played a joke, and that the victim was a girl that he had seen down by the docks. They had made her think that it was him who asked her out, to meet him at the Keyhole Rock, and they had laughed when she had gone and waited in the cold. And that was why he chose that night to leave the shed they let him stay in and the boat they let him work on. They were bad and they were cruel and she had left her roses on the rock for no one.

Maybe she was someone he was meant to meet. Maybe it was time to meet someone again. Maybe it was time the time for punishment had passed.

Almost he could remember what the punishment was for. Almost he could pronounce the name he had before the punishment was his.

He felt the sea was on his side. The sea was not about to let him worry. He was free. The wind, the waves, the distance all said he was innocent, deserving of a new name.

He wondered what her name might be. He thought that she deserved a new name for him too. He thought that they should meet.

The sea said all in time. All in good time. And so he walked along that nameless road down to the sea. And there he sat until the sun went down and listened to the message of the sea. And he went home that night with all the answers in his head, though they were hardly sorted yet.


5 April 2019
Texas Jim
Prospect, Nova Scotia
www.granitecoast.ca