Embers at Caswell Beach.

My father spent his last week at the beach house feeding his life’s work into the little grill we used for drum, mackerel, and well-done burgers during our family visits to the coast. The house is a small four-room beach house at Caswell Beach. It has weathered countless hurricanes, and my dad used to spend weeks there at a time. It was just him with his typewriter and three or four bottles of Wild Turkey, his bourbon of choice. I would imagine him sitting there in his chair at the unbalanced table, his spotty beard giving his soft, boyish face a roughness he wanted to put onto paper, his long fingers stained a sickly yellow from the Lucky Strike cigarettes he would only smoke when he was at the beach, writing.

When my parents died a few years ago and it was just me, they left me the house as my inheritance. I spent about two weeks in that house that served as a vacation home when I was growing up, trying to decide if I should listen to my realtor friend and sell “the cute cottage,” or just keep it. I sat in his old, cushionless swivel chair and opened the empty notebooks he spared from the fire. As I grew up and spent more time away from my parents, the house became a refuge for my father, a man haunted by words he could never string together well enough to say, “I finished my novel. Now we can go back to how it used to be.” How it used to be. How it never was again.

Now it is just memories I have of them. How Mom would wear that navy-blue one piece that always smelled of coconut oil and cigarette smoke, those Jackie O sunglasses, and a hat large enough that we didn’t need an umbrella on the sunniest days on the beach. I would wear my cutoff khakis and my straw hat. His sunburned shoulders, the skin peeling off in strips like ghost snakeskin. Me in my red swim trunks and that salt-stiffened New Orleans Saints T-shirt that he got me on that one trip where, after some tears and a half-hearted confession, he told me and Mom, “I found God.”

We all three would just sit there on those short little beach chairs and watch pelicans dive for their lunches and wonder out loud where those ships and small boats slipping past on the horizon were going, questions with no answers, like the way he never finished anything he started writing. What he did manage to type or write in the dozens of bound journals was all burned up in the little grill we cooked fresh-caught drum and mackerel on. The half-empty can of lighter fluid he sprayed on the charcoal still sat on the shelf above the grill. The charred pages were still in the kettle, mixed with the ash and the pasty grease of the fish and burgers he cooked on the grates. I can imagine the ashen gray bits of the pages floating up from the fire. They danced on the currents of hot and cool air. I wondered if maybe a sentence or maybe a paragraph escaped complete incineration and, carried by those currents, landed in the sea oats growing on the dunes that rise to the level of the house’s roof.

He spent two days of his last trip to the beach feeding his life into the little inferno. He died two weeks later, two hours before my mother followed him home. At least I want to believe he went where I knew she would be for eternity. I am sure he wanted to get there first.

The sound of the waves is more hollow to me inside these four walls now. I remember my dad brought me two conch shells back from one of his trips to the Cayman Islands. If you held the large shell with the bright pink inside toward your ear and you listened real hard, you could hear the sound of the Atlantic Ocean. Inside the now dull shell of a house, the sound was too muffled to be the song of the ocean.

I miss the man I loved and barely knew.

From the Archivist