Of Waves and War

5: your wicked deeds and plans

Telemachus

"Oi, why don't you go up there? Your dad died in the war?" they're calling everyone up to the board whose parents died in the war. I really don't know why they do that. I hate this school.

"He's not dead," I pick at a scab on my wrist.

"He's probably got a wife and dozen kids somewhere else. My ma says that's why the men don't come home. They found another woman and didn't bother to come back."

"His dad's a war criminal. They're criminals the lot of them. That's why he's not come back. He probably killed someone."

"Oi, I'm gonna marry your mum, you know she's got to marry somebody what with all that money."

I stand up and walk out. It was worth the try. Attending class. I snatch up my bag and run, hot tears running down my face. I hate crying. I hate letting them see me cry.

It isn't fair.

"You were supposed to come back," I sigh, addressing the sky, "Mum needs you. She cries every night do you know that? Do you care?"

I'm not angry because he's gone. Not right now. I'm angry because there exists the possibility they are right. That the idealized version I have of my father is long gone or worse never even existed to begin with. That the memories I have of him, faint, hazy memories not more defined than the faces of clouds in the sky.

His smile, his rough, thin fingers playing through my hair. Letting me sit in his lap at dinner and fuss with the buttons on his coat. Him walking up behind my mother and catching her in his arms. Little things that after all this time I'm sure I've made up.

I can't stand it.

"She mourns for you. Every day. It would be nice if you could come back, or give us the convenience of a convincing death," I fold my arms. When I was small, too small to write to him, my mother would have me speak whatever I wanted her to put down. I've never gotten out of the habit of talking to him. Briefly during the years of the war when I learnt to write myself, I'd draw him pictures, write on and on about my days here in Ithaca, anything at all. And he'd respond in kind, pages upon pages. When the mail arrived my mother and I would disappear to our rooms with the letters, she so that I would not see her sobs, me for some privacy with my father for him to teach me to be a man.

I learnt dozens of long words from deciphering his script, which was oft tear stained, as he talked less and less of the war and more of his own boyhood, and the things he'd do with me when he returned. Teach me to bow hunt, to pick a lock though he was sure my mother had that covered, teach me to throw a good punch, though again he was sure my mother had that covered. He told me of his comrades, the other soldiers how they'd vex him. That if they didn't annoy him too much he'd let me meet them someday. That we'd go to Mount Parnassus, to his grandfather's estate, together, and walk old hunting trails for hours. That I should never doubt that he loved me more than anything and was coming home as soon as he could manage so we could conspire and be awful together as the gods intended.

Sometimes he'd write bits in my mother's letters he'd have her read out to me if he thought I needed it. If I did poorly at school or got caught bullied or got caught stealing (I was offended at that one) or if I had a crush on someone or hurt myself. When I was small my mother would bundle me into her arms and read the letters to me, going back as I requested it, and letting me trace his signature on both sets of letters, his name on hers, and then a simple 'your father' on mine. Though he'd sometimes later on vary that up with terms of endearment to her, and then joking with me, addressing it 'son and heir, mightiest boy in Ithaca' and signing it 'cleverest of the Acheneans only person with a functioning brain on this side of the ocean'. Things like that.

Occasionally the letters would include a post-script. Usually some instruction or task that I was more than happy to perform for him. Such as "give your mother and grandmother an extra hug from me tonight" or "help your grandfather sweep up his shop this weekend" or  "if this gets to you before the tenth switch your grandmother's salt and sugar tins, do not fear your grandmother WILL blame me" (she did, screaming his name quite loudly before sobbing) or "draw an x on all the mirrors while your mother sleeps she'll tell you why" (she did not she started laughing then crying and when I asked to be told why she said 'Eulises that is not appropriate for the child' and started crying again) or "give your mother this pressed flower on the night of the seventh if this arrives in time". That type of thing. I loved all my errands and told him so, I was more than happy to perform them. It was as though we had a secret game he and I. And my mother would laugh seeing me run through the house followed by all the dogs, and my grandmother finding yet another thing in her kitchen muddled would sob about how 'that boy weaponized the child from a million miles away' and things of that kind.

I loved them all. We would wait each week, my mother and I. We'd race down to the end of the drive, be it snowing, or raining, or just lazy summer sunshine, and we'd wait for the post to come. She'd press the envelope to her face, as though it were the nearest she could come to kissing him, tears welling in her dark eyes. I would study mine, tracing the address, judging the weariness of his hand. And together we would return inside, reading the letters over all evening until we had the contents memorized.

And then they stopped.

The letters stopped a week before we got word the war was won.

"He's coming home," my mother said. "That's all."

And we waited.

And waited.

All the others returned, gaunt from war, eyes shattered, faces drawn, looking unable to smile. Daily we'd haunt the docks. Waiting for him to be in the batches of wounded. Of survivors. Then finally the ships of urns, we searched the names, with countless others, hoping for some source of respite.

Nothing.

He'd vanished without a trace.

"He's coming home," my mother said, either to herself or to me, I knew not.

"Why isn't he with everyone else though? Why does everyone get to return but he doesn't?"

"The gods know," she would say, squeezing my shoulders.

I don't know when hope started to fade. Or how it begins to leave us. As days to turn to weeks. And weeks to months. And months to years.

And one day we quit going out to meet the post. And one day went by without me sorting through his letters for some clue. We did cyphers as a game in our correspondence. Usually it was just a place on a map or a site on the grounds he wanted me to visit. But there was no hidden code. Nothing to which I had the key.

He was just gone.

And plenty of people lost their dads in the war. I know that. I do. Plenty of people had their dads simply not come home. Because they died MIA or because they did desert or whatever. But of course it's my greatest tragedy that it's my dad.

More than that, if he's really gone for good, aren't we supposed to be okay at some point? My mother cries every night. Sometimes she cries out in nightmares. There are nights she doesn't sleep at all. I see her, up weaving, or reading his letters over again and again.

I shut up his letters. I was too angry with him to get any council from them. But then inevitably I am drawn back. I have to believe that the man who wrote them was real. He wasn't just my dad. He was my friend as well. When I was sad with school and I wrote about failing a test or being last a sports ball chase toss things (I'm not good with sports), he would only encourage me, offer a similar tale or sage advice (deflating all their sports toss balls did turn out to be as entertaining as he predicted).

And then it just stopped. Not even to know how he passed. Quietly in the night? Murdered? 

And it's not just him. We tracked it down. His four ships from Ithaca, any of which he may have been on, were lost. Weirdly enough, one was well mainland, in the ruins of a sacked city. But that's beside the point. The other three are vanished without a trace.

"People don't just disappear. My mother always said you were full of tricks, to return shall be a great one," I say, quietly, stopping my tears. I must walk home and think of a plausible excuse for why I left school so early.