The Unbroken Circle

It was a dark and stormy night, gale force winds, the kind where ghosts of shipwrecked sailors are gathering on the shore to share elegies of their own lives cut short by the fierce waters of Lake Michigan. From Frankfort to Arcadia, scattered bones of the Ida and Minnehaha shift and twist in the Lake’s deep graveyard.

The ghosts could see soft lights within the villagers’ homes. Safe. Warm. Blessed. Waves pound so furiously the sailors call out to hear each other. Their phantom voices reach the villagers with an eerie echo. Up in his kitchen, a sailor, one Buster Driftwood, rushes to his kitchen window. His wife, Bessie, is busy at the stove making her best dumplings for his favorite pot pie. Yet she’d paused to sit down with him for a chat.

“Ma!” says Buster, “I swear I hear the wailing of the shipwrecked.”

“O, Sweetheart, the storm does sound haunting!”

He rushes to give her a great hug.

“Why, Buster Driftwood, what a lovely gesture, and me with flour all over myself.”

“I hear them, Bess, I do. Below on the shore!”

“O, Lord, Buster, their fear in great storms, the terror of drowning. It’s just your imagination makes you suffer.”

Buster feels deep in his soul a mysterious force. Puts on his heavy storm gear, immense high boots. Grasps his brightest lantern.

“Ma, I’ve got to go down there.” His face flushed. The familiar angle of his cheek flexing, urgent.

“My God, Buster, those winds are too powerful!”

Yet mad as it seems, she knows, Buster must go. She rises to open the door, glances back at the stove, turns to say good bye.

He’s vanished.

For solace, Bessie returns to the delicate task of a tasty crust.

Moving through the driving rain, Buster thinks of Bess, worrying herself to a frenzy as seamen’s wives do, yet easing his special dinner into the oven, complete with dumplings! As if all will be well.

Should he return to her? Yet the rain seems graciously to open a way forward to reach those voices calling to him.

Welcome, Brother!” they cry. “Come sit, tell us your story. What wreck took you?”

“Ay, Mates,” Buster joins in, “A lowly vessel! The Destiny. Swamped. Doomed we were, O, how I struggled against the devilish dark waters, but those dreadful waves dragged me down!”

The storm rages yet does not break their ghostly circle.

Bessie stirs the peas, tender chicken, adds the dumplings, finishing touches on the crust; nearby, the photograph of Buster and her so fresh, he, in his gear going to sea. That final time he left, O, hadn’t he given her a young man’s hug, strong, full of passion. Their new life bursting with promise.

His body never found.

Her so lonely tonight, surely, wasn’t it a kindness he’d stopped by. Such a good chat and hug!

She’ll keep his dinner warm. Buster Driftwood, he’ll know how to handle darkness, the storm