The Wet Wood Slips

Ah, the wet wood slips. It slips in my hands, fingertip sliding like drips down the polish of a maple tree dead in a forest long ago. The maple is rebirthed in the music of my hands, but my fingering falters and I lose the strings. A note is lost between the treacherous fear shaking my hand at the neck and the ready calmness of my bow at the base. My abandonment of the ragtime tune shakes me. This is my lifeline, and I must play. But the wet wood slips.

“It’s alright,” the bandmaster says. His words are almost lost to me, but there is no mistake in the shape of his arms, the movement of his body, as he directs the song on from our tiny circle into the wide sweep of a dark sea. “It’s alright,” he repeats.

A violin stroke sweeps by my ear. My friend of our circle, my bunkmate, the Belgian and the next star in our constellation, plays on. He does not falter. I focus my eyes on the clench of his jaw, the shudder in his shoulders, the grey of his mouth, and the chapped and wind-beat and cold-painted red of his face. His instrument is cradled against him, his body bent into its sound, his every effort fixed on string and neck and bow. He does not look my way. He does not need to. The tune of the star beside me has no reflecting voice to its sound, and I cannot bear it to call alone.

In my hand, my bow finds again the melody I left off. We play next a waltz to the sea. The scrape of horsehair on catgut strings grounds me to a different reality. Knuckles curl around the bow, tighter than is proper, cruder than I was taught, but it holds in my grip. It swings to memories of June months on Monaco beaches in sunlight. My left hand is near to frozen in a light curl, as one might lift a cup of tea in the lobby of the Leeds Grand Hotel, each digit poised for the following movement of pounce and pressure upon its brother string. The G string sings, I feel it vibrate in my shoes and in my proud chest, and I think of a room in Lille where I have known hunger, hope, and comfort. The G string so often vibrated against that floor and into those walls. Maybe an echo of it even now hums on, across the wasteland tide, to join the pulse of the cello itself on the deck where the wet wood slips.

Rising with all the pressure of the flooding of the sea comes a compulsion to return to the warmth and the light of the lounge where we began an hour or more before. It whispers safety. It begs off the nightmare in the outer air. The wet wood of the fingerboard slides upward beneath my thumb and I must dig a fingernail into the varnish and indent it, wounding the body of my steadfast companion. But my thumb now has a grip, and my hand regains control. Surely even the lounge is now a hall of respite for sea creatures and ghosts and full of ice and salt and foam.

Songs we play for seconds, minutes. It might be eternal, yet I know it cannot be so long. A mere moment, rising above the sea. Cello, violin, pianist with abandoned and now-imagined keys, and bass. We had been two bands, and now we form a new star sign against that Atlantic sky, playing as one. The songs are dancing reels and they are battle cries, and they are all the same.

The wet wood of the deck beneath my feet tilts. I move an inch, my chair shifts, and my eyes, flashing, rest on our conductor again.

“It’s alright,” he repeats to me. This time there are no words. It is spoken in the way he smiles. Even while the wet wood slips.

“Look,” says the England man, pianist. His voice I have known longest. His voice accompanied myself and my cello on another ship, another lounge, another wet wooden deck.

Upon a sea too smooth for tragedy, small boats scrabble for space amid debris. They are still departing, but their chaos of relief is distant. The crowd on the deck does not seem to be a part of us.

The Englishman smiles. His keys were left below deck, so his fingers play the air. It’s a hymn we’ve struck upon, a song I barely recall, and my hands play as though drawn along by those English strokes on imagined ivory. “They are going home,” he says to our band, to our deck, to our lonely star-stabbed sky in which we are just one more prick of light.

A crowd has gathered to our playing, swaying to the music as though their world remains unbroken. We play to them from our deck. There is just the rise of the ocean and the rise of the stern, and the boats and their passengers slowly spreading from our doom-stage like spilt oil.

“They are,” I say to my fellow stars, the bands of light in this constellation circle band. I look again to the crowd gathered, the boatless watchmen. Their calm has not yet left them. Is it ignorance or is it the music that keeps them still? With my words, I acknowledge both the boats adrift and the crowd stilled. “We will play them home.”

Fear is in all of us. Fear for the groan of the ship holding us, fear for the moan of the sea that waits us, fear for the audience we have prompted to desert us and the ones who refuse to abandon. I want a desk and a pen to write a letter, and with my bow I play as though words in ink are spread upon the page by the song. A lilt for my parents, my brother. A medley for the beaches and the hotel and the French countryside of my birth. A hymn to June months and tea and sun.

It ends, our song, and we pause. Uncertain. A shipman has frozen in his task, watching us, wordless.

Our bandmaster waves at him. “You still have work to do.” And the man conducts himself away.

“Another song?” our great star inquires of his band. We begin again.

Before, at the start, we played for calm. Now, we play for urgency, action, farewell. The song is a salute. The waves have not yet reached us. Still, I can feel their pull. The sky seems higher above me, and the ocean encompasses all.

Water on my strings, my hair, soaking my suit, trailing in diamonds on my instrument, beckons me toward the sea below us. I do not recall getting wet. It might be of the lowering of the lifeboats, the hurry of the crowd and crew up and down, the rush of the earned mutiny served this vessel and her captain only at her last breaths. It might have been of shards of the ice we struck. It might have been of the embrace of the sea greeting us. It might have been a French boy’s dreams. But it is in my pocket and glistening on my shoes. And there, under my fingers and beneath our tunes, the wet wood slips. I grip again and play it through. My hands are tight, foreign. Firm. They will play to the end of the tune.

It is the finale, the sweet crescendo of the night, and the setting of our star sign into the horizon of water coming up as we finger and bow and play and the deck slides higher.

I stand, giving up my seat on a chair on a deck as I watch crew and crowd give over their seat on a boat.

The song is complete, our repertoire spent. The bandmaster nods and turns to face the sea. Hard-knuckled and salt-swept, I still hold my bow and the carved gift of the maple tree that once lived and in song has lived again. There is madness on the sea, in the heart of the ice, in the roar of the death of a ship. But in my head there is only stars and only song.

Ah, beneath my feet the vessel deck now shudders, and the wet wood slips.