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Lyrics
Yes, I Knew Her
D.M. Fratini
Read by David Dotterer
Garzelli was the one who heard it. He was new at the time, hadn't gone deaf yet. The two of us were on deck squeaking around in our rubbers, locking things down in the calm before the storm.
I'll battle a hurricane any day. It's the calm that rattles my nerves. Everything slow and subtle and quiet. That's not the ocean.
Garzelli grabbed my arm to hold me still and stop me squeaking. "What was that?" The horn blasted again, and we had to wait for our ears to stop ringing. "There," he said. I didn't hear anything, but after two years of that foghorn, I could barely hear Garzelli.
"It sounds like." He dragged me to the rail, and the two of us stared out at nothing but foggy darkness. " someone crying," he said, " a woman."
"A woman out there?" There wasn't another vessel within a hundred miles of us. What with the hurricane warning, the Coast Guard patrol had swept the area for daredevils and fools before dusk.
Garzelli's eyes groped the fog. Every shaved hair on his head, chin and neck stood on end. Every filament of him quivered to hear. He gave me the heebies.
I tried to tease him out of it, " That's how it starts. First you hear sirens, next you see mermaids, finally one day " I pressed my palms together over my head and leaned out in a cornball arabesque as if to dive.
Like a divining rod, my hands started shaking. Straight out where they pointed, the fog parted, and there she was. Just a shadow on the shimmery surface, but I knew like I knew my own name, it was a woman.
Garzelli ran off, crashed around in the storage bin, and came back with the searchlight which he sighted down my hands.
She wasn't 20 yards off, red hair spilling over an orange life-vest and reaching its tendrils out across the surface. She looked natural there, a sea creature in her element.
Then everything went nuts. Garzelli and I were screaming our heads off without even realizing it. "Help!" "All hands on deck!" "Woman overboard!" Then all hands were on deck, and everyone was shouting.
Snyder and Justus made a kind of lasso with rope and a donut preserver, but no matter how close it landed, the woman made no effort toward it. "She's dead," someone said.
"Quiet!" I hollered, and we all froze, straining to hear. The foghorn blasted. Then "There!" Garzelli shouted. An enormous thunderclap made us all jump. All except Justus who looked to Garzelli, "Mother of God." He'd heard her too. He started to climb over the rail, but hesitated, maybe thinking of his wife and newborn at home.
Now, I want to say that I saw a life in danger and thought only to save it, but in truth I was not so selfless; I was greedy. Greedy for the chance to be a hero and win the damsel. She was a miracle, a gift brought forth from the deep, the stuff of legends. And I was so young and starving to be larger-than-life and loved. So as Justus hesitated, I vaulted past him through the mist.
The storm seemed to start the instant I hit the water, as if I had been the required ingredient. The cold rang through my bones and blood, and I thought for a stunned moment that I would never move again. I forgot all about living and loving and was thinking only of dying, the weight of it, as I kicked and stroked my way over to her.
She faced away, out to sea. Between the fog horn blasts, over the rumble of the rising storm, I could clearly hear the whole crew and myself hollering at her, but she made no effort to turn to see us. "Frozen," I thought, "her limbs are too numb."
When my reaching fingers tangled in her reaching hair, I was finally close enough to hear her weak cry for myself. I pulled her toward me, meaning to wrap her in my live warmth as her hair was enwrapping me. I pushed water to turn her around, to see her face.
I had never seen a dead human being before. It defies your sense of reality. Flesh is pink and warm and pliant, not gray, not cold, not stiff. It made her appear, if not real, then ethereal, or extraterrestrial. I think in life she had been only ordinarily attractive, but in death, she was so extraordinary, I almost forgot to swim.
Her final expression was not of pain or terror. Her eyes gazed not out across the roiling sea for help or curse. Her eyes rested peacefully and lovingly, at a spot no further than her own breast where a trembling cat, gray as the fog, clung and mewed a salt-scorched cry. The young woman's right arm circled under the cat keeping it mostly above the water. The cat was soaked to the bone, but not submerged, and therefore it had not yet died of hypothermia like its mistress.
By the scruff of its neck, I tried to rescue it. I caught myself squirming like a sissy to avoid touching the dead girl out of some instinctual dread or reverence. But the cat dug its claws into her turtleneck and hid its head under her chin, shutting its gleaming gold eyes against me. It was not going to abandon itself to me, the hero.
That cat had known that girl maybe all its life, and that brought the fact of her home to me. She had been a breathing, living, and thus fragile individual only an hour or so before. No more or no less fragile than myself. And like mine, her life would have been full of joys and fears and loneliness and loveif for no one else, at least for this cat who would not let go of the one person on earth it knew to be safe.
I watched the pair of them bob on the waking water and thought that that was it, the thing for which I'd dove into the storming sea. "Love." The one, in all the world, you know to be safe. There's nothing particularly human or heroic about it, but seeing it in the shape of a wet-skinny cat clinging to a dead girl made it seem all the more precious for that.
The crew was already tugging on my towline, reeling me in. No longer repelled, I pulled the girl against me and held her with her face tucked under my chin, the cat between us, shaking wildly.
They hoisted us up onto the deck, the storm, fully awakened, battered us all the way. When the crew closed in over us, only just discovering the situation, the cat finally let go and let me tuck it into my slicker and take it away to dry safety. The foghorn blasted all the while. Neither of us stopped trembling for a week.
We never found out who the girl had been. No boats or plane wrecks had been reported within 1,000 miles of us that stormy night. I kept checking in with missing persons for a few years. Nothing.
We named the cat Old Ironside, and he lived out the rest of his long life with us on the Frying Pan. He was a fat, happy, sociable guy, and I was, of course, his favorite.
But I used to catch him, perched in the sun, staring his cat stare out to sea, and I imagined he was still on watch for her. Imagined all the secret things about her he, and only he, would have known. The things she said or songs she sang when no other humans were listening. Ironside would look at me abruptly, as if he'd known I was watching him all along, and his eyes, so full of memories, seemed to say, "Yes, I knew her."
When he finally died, so many years later, I grieved for the loss of him, and for the loss of all he knew of her and took with him, and for myself, who, though I've loved many women in my life, have never been able to say, what he needed no English to say: "Yes, I knew her."
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