Gold Coins On Deep Water
The dangers of unintended poetry
I’ve been venturing into the deep forest again recently, the dog and I, as the light slants at greater and greater angles and the summer loses grip and topples toward autumn. This means there will be more Dog and I writing coming soon, bubbling up through the moss and earth and cloud and ice and seeping into my soul like warm honey.
In the meantime here is a powerful flick of the wrist that skims a little gem across the ether to you. I hope you enjoy this one because I really like it, but as usual I’ll probably need you to echo it back to me so I understand why.
The coins skipped along, bouncing five, six, seven, eight, nine jumps, then fell beneath the surface darting away like a glittering fish. His travelled even further. Seventeen skips before sinking. Each time they sunk I held my breath, like seeing a person fall from a cliff, one second they were there and the next they were gone forever.
He kept an eye to see I didn’t pocket any, to make sure I threw every single one. He counted the coins as he gave them to me, one, two, three…seven coins, and he counted my throws, all six throws, smirking at every one.
“Don’t fuck around, throw properly, use your wrist,” he shouted, resting on one leg, his forefinger and thumb pinching his waist in a casual pose but his perpetual fury projected a dramatic showiness instead.
I held the last gold coin in my hand, its weight like a tablespoon of honey or a baby bird, sweet and delicate, pulsating with vitality and life, something to be savoured and treated carefully. My teeth caressed my lower lip in a gentle bite.
“I told you, you can only see them if you throw them,” he said, his blue eyes shining with a spiteful curiosity through the purple bruising, “so throw it now or you’re a liar.”
I thought of running but there was nowhere to go. One gold coin wouldn’t get me far. The six could have changed things but not for long. Besides, I’d have to run half a day to reach the limits of his father’s land.
“Throw it,” his raspy voice echoing against the quarry cliff around the lake, “Throoooooooow iiiiiiittah,” he sang out like a chant. Then he reached into his pocket and in one quick graceful movement another coin was skimming along like a droplet of sunlight on the dark lake surface, one jump after another, alive and kicking, until suddenly it ran out of puff and surrendered to the inevitability of the lake.
“Whoah, did you see that?” he cried out, “twenty for sure.”
I looked at the ripples overlapping each other in a confusion of tiny waves like a question mark on the lake surface
I had asked him on the way to the quarry how he got his black eye but he refused to tell me until we arrived at the shoreline.
“You don’t want to know,” he’d said at first so I didn’t reply and my silence taunted him until he told me his father and two colleagues had been drinking whisky, sitting in his father’s leather armchairs, crystal tumblers chinking in hand.
“They’d found some poems I’d written and asked me to read them out loud.”
“Listen to the little fucking Oscar Wilde, are you a fucking queer boy? Writing poems, you’ll be dancing next you little fucking peasent,” he did a perfect impression of his father’s pompous voice, “they laughed at me and they mocked me.”
His brother had appeared at the door, curious, and his father had stood up and slapped the brother hard in the face. “I should slap you for every poem your bastard brother has written,” and his colleagues had laughed as hard as the slaps.
“They chased us to the library,” he said, “and we hid behind the slammed doors but they kept pounding away shouting that we weren’t so big we couldn’t still be beaten.”
That was the first time that day I had held my breath as he told me of his father’s cruelty.
“But they were wrong,” he said, “We were big enough and they were too drunk, so we flung open the doors and ran at them with all we had. We beat them so hard my father won’t go to the office for a week,” and then he pulled a handful of gold coins from his pocket, “And these little beauties are his,” he said holding up a pirate’s bounty.
“Show me,” I said but he pushed the coins back into his pocket.
A treasure like I’d never seen. He hadn’t ever known financial hardship, at least, but the truculent world of his family’s brutality allowed him to sniff out desperation like a camel sniffs out the rain. He was thrilled by my panic.
“We’re going to skim them on the quarry lake,” he’d said and stared at me with his sad blue eyes ringed in purple bruises. That was the second time that day I had held my breath as he trembled in his own frustrated fury.
At the lakeside he counted the coins into my hand, seven gold coins, more money than I had ever seen. They got heavier and heavier until they felt like a great weight of responsibility. I could hear my father’s voice whispering of the inequality and the unfairness, whispering of all that should never be, whispering of the never ending cruelty that went on behind the closed doors at Colony House. I could hear my mother gently proposing that he should keep himself to himself for this was the way of things, and my father replying that it was indeed the way of things but that things can change.
“Throw it,” he shouted again.
My father had grown up on these wild hills. He managed the horses and spent a lifetime under open skies where he watched the weather change through four seasons in a day, and then in the evenings he returned and wrote poetry that longed for lost times and unreachable dreams. It was my father that had encouraged this beaten black-eyed boy to write his own poems, encouraged him to search within himself for something deeper, encouraged him to open his heart and turn away from the cruelty of Colony House.
It was these poems that had been found by drunken hands and it was these poems that clenched fists to be swung and it was these poems that landed us by the lakeside casting fortunes into the water.
My father had told me to watch my step, that cruelty flows like water through the generations and that I should treat this boy with fairness for we do not judge a man by the father’s sins, but I should be wary for cruelty is prone to blossom in especially barren land.
His next coin skimmed across the surface like a swallow dipping for water boatmen, dip, dip, dop. I was entranced as the ripples merged like circles in a Japanese dry garden when his steps pounded toward me and my hand was grabbed, my fingers wrenched and the coin ripped from my clutches.
“You can’t throw it can you, your can’t let that gold escape your grubby little palms can you, you little fucking peasent,” he sneered as he held the coin between his fingers like a tiny burning planet orbiting my face, closer and closer it came, and then it was gone as he stood pinching his hips again as unconcerned as an bystander at a train wreck.
My shame came from all directions as my father’s gentle voice told me to keep wary, and I heard the black-eyed boy’s raspy voice telling me over and over that I was a pathetic little lying peasent and a deeper well of shame came at the stupidity and waste of it all, and then a shame as my thoughts whispered to me that I might dive down into the depths and fish up these coins one moonlit night and take them home and hide them somewhere so that in the coming years they might protect us, or perhaps just me, and then another more vivid jagged shame gripped me at the thought of “just me” and I saw in his black-eyed eyes that he too was wracked in the loneliness and shame of “just me.”
“Give me the coin,” I said and held out my palm. He tutted and dropped the coin into my hand and I spun on my heel and planted my leg as I leaned back and threw the coin like a graceful dancing crane, my wrist a bull whip, the coin skipping and skimming across the lake like a dragon fly, twenty, thirty, forty, countless tiny small leaps into the deep dark centre of the lake, slowing and slowing until it sank and took all its evils with it.
He whooped and leapt so that his echoing voice bounced from the cliff face like a banshee when suddenly it was joined in chorus by a whinnying black horse rearing up upon its hind legs at the edge of the cliff face on which sat my father who calmed the horse with a gentle hand upon its crest and as the horse snorted the boy turned and ran and I stood fast there on the shoreline longing for things lost with my shame and pride and guilt and humility running through me like four seasons in a day.
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So many favorites. I guess the only way to tell you, is to show you;
“But the truculent world of his family’s brutality allowed him to sniff out desperation like a camel sniffs out the rain. He was thrilled by my panic.”
“My father had grown up on these wild hills. He managed the horses and spent a lifetime under open skies where he watched the weather change through four seasons in a day.”
“My father had told me to watch my step, that cruelty flows like water through the generations and that I should treat this boy with fairness for we do not judge a man by the father’s sins, but I should be wary for cruelty is prone to blossom in especially barren land.”
“That was the second time that day I had held my breath as he trembled in his own frustrated fury.”
“Four seasons and a day”
Just brilliant, Jonathan. Truly a wonderful story, almost reads like a fable, a cautionary tale. The father tried to beat the poetry, right out of his son. Your writing has allowed me to imagine this as a book with illustrations. The boys on the beach, the shiny gold coins. The father sitting on the stallion, watching from above.
He hung on to the gold coin unable to throw it at first, as it represented everything he was not. As if he held his own family’s morals, traditions , love and his father’s poetry in his hand .The black stallion , a perfect companion for the father, poetry in motion, strength, beauty, wildness, trust. Also defining his father, as the gold coins defined the other. So glad to hear you and the dog have headed back into the forest .This paragraph captures the essence of your writing when you and ‘the dog’ adventure together;
“…as the light slants at greater and greater angles and the summer loses grip and topples toward autumn. This means there will be more Dog and I writing coming soon, bubbling up through the moss and earth and cloud and ice and seeping into my soul like warm honey.”
Like the taste of “warm honey” straight from the comb, I am looking forward to more.
I quote your words back to you because your stories are such deep, intricate weavings. I hope I got it right, at the very least, my own interpretation. I guess I could have made this much shorter; I loved it!
But then again, you know me…
I like this, Jonathan, I once was the boy with a black eye.