Sweet Sal by the Sea
Young Sal of Nantucket - a good boy, a sweet boy. Orphaned young, and raised by a rum-drunk, salt-tongued, near-blind lobster trap named Jenny, who gummed corn-cob pipes, muttered "Jack Damn Tar!" for no observable reason, and fed him on shanties and legends of the brine more than fare (though a serving of her fleshy chowder could fortify the boy for a week). It was a stimulating childhood.
Full of notions, he set out for life at sea when still a lad, and saw more of human ways than could be denounced from any pulpit (much of it recorded by his frequent and beloved shipmate, "Hermano" Melville). He became port fluent or better in ten languages, sweat the fevers of seven continents, and assisted in the births of several children, siring none.
"Sweet Sal" the sailors called him, for though he relished rough and bloody work, his cultural appetite was for the finer things: Beaujolais, silk scarves, poetry, and lieder, for which, he lamented, he could give no voice; had he taken a stab at Der Erlkönig, he'd have been spurned as a hawker of street-ballads.
He returned to his island for good, not yet fifty, but with an overworked and knotted body that told the weather, tidal shifts, and phases of the moon.
Jenny's shack, long empty, was in worse shape than her bones, which lay six feet away and three down per her design (she dug the hole, drank a jug of rum, fell in, and let the wind do the rest). Sweet Sal demolished the ruin by hand, then slowly built in its place a sturdier home, this time with bookshelves, and painted it the color of his preferred beverage - rose milk.
One mild summer day, he appeared on the beach, regarding his personal expanse of the Atlantic. He wore a burgundy bodice and flouncy white blouse, a satin skirt as pink as a shell's interior, and, perhaps excessively, an exquisite calash bonnet, also pink (and for which he provided the whalebones), made by a charmed milliner in Marseille.
He cleared his throat, and in a baritone curdled by catarrh, recited:
"Thy bosom is endeared by all hearts..."
If his days began as did his life, naked and wet (he woke at first light, marched straight into the surf, and would not return until he had caught breakfast by hand), they ended far less ruggedly, in the delicate finery he'd collected the world over, reciting, at sundown, to the ocean's often turbulent reception, the most inspired and luminous verse, mostly on the theme of love.
An emaciated old hound with bloodshot eyes and a hooked spine (it walked sideways) appeared outside Sweet Sal's shack one Thanksgiving morning, and remained there for the rest of its life. Sal named it Jenny. She hobbled to the shore with him every day, slumped in the sand, and waited as he addressed the deep. A thrust tide once shot past Sweet Sal's heels, and in its retreat, carried Jenny away. Sweet Sal ruined his only crinoline rescuing her. "Jack Damn Tar!", he cried, and carried her home.
He bathed her in a halved whiskey cask using the last of his English lavender soap. Jenny loved baths the way Sweet Sal loved the sea.
Together, through sun and squall, they found a measure of happiness. Tempered, of course, by their respective aches.
By the Sea
I started early, took my dog,
And visited the sea;
The mermaids in the basement
Came out to look at me.
And frigates in the upper floor
Extended hempen hands,
Presuming me to be a mouse
Aground, upon the sands.
But no man moved me till the tide
Went past my simple shoe,
And past my apron and my belt,
And past my bodice too,
And made as he would eat me up
As wholly as a dew
Upon a dandelion's sleeve —
And then I started too.
And he — he followed close behind;
I felt his silver heel
Upon my ankle, — then my shoes
Would overflow with pearl.
Until we met the solid town,
No man he seemed to know;
And bowing with a mighty look
At me, the sea withdrew.
Shanty: Emily Dickinson
Sweet Sal: Captain Jerry Columbus (Ret.)
Arranged and recorded by Joe Christiano