A Disturbance of Gulls

H. E. Francis H.E. Francis is a professor of English at the University ofAlabama, Huntsville, and is the founding editor of Poem magazine. His first collection of stories appeared in Spanish translation in Buenos Aires, Toda la gente que nunca tuve (AU the People I Never Had), in 1966. In 1973 his collection of stories, The Itinerary of Beggars, won the Iowa School of Letters Award for Short Fiction. His translations of Argentine literature have appeared in numerous magazines, and a recent collection of stories, Naming Things, was published in the Illinois series. A Disturbance of Gulls for Richard S. Moore THAT SUMMER, he did not know—until he drove up to the summer house on the island and there was no one to come to the door and embrace and welcome him, no old man to surprise, first with the bark of his dog, Pal, then the scurrying of Shasta and the Whore of Babylon and the half-dozen other cats, no old man bent over the kitchen table, his crippled fingers around the bowl he drank tea from, who would turn his quivering albino eyes up and squint, "Is it you? You?" with the abrupt cough of his laughter and the joyful cackle in his throat—no, he did not know that it would be the summer of his pursuit. A hundred times he turned to his mother to say, "And tell me—" But she was not there either. Sometimes he was tempted to walk the rooms—downstairs, up: Somebody? You? Even imagination did not reveal emptiness so absolute. When he had driven to the island for the summer, he had been prepared to meet the locked house, to open into death, time, memory, aU that life, history; into must, motes, stillness. He moved past furniture, islands in that strange silent sea. The house waited for its inhabitants, for breath to flow through, for eyes to stand views back in windows . Because it was so empty, the fullness was uncontainable. After, when he had let the ocean breezes in, cleaned house, and eventually tended the lawn and garden, he would tackle the other house, the smaU cottage in the rear, where his grandfather had lived. That house fronted the sand; and the sea, fickle as weather, beat up to it, washed down, broke breath eternally over the house. He swam before breakfast and again afternoons between dawdlings and the real work of study. He never tired of gazing at the bay, cupped between two reaches of beach which formed an open crab's claw, where the town harbor was, and the small island, and endless sea beyond. Over a web of ropes and pilings—Judd's lobster pots—distant, stood the lighthouse, at night a white burning, on clear days an eye dead andfutile. Gulls, afloat, almost in stiU suspension, wouldbreak sky, dive straight, or swoop, or settle there on the pilings far out in the web. And always there was one gull on the ashen post close by his grandfather's front window: hours long sometimes, immobile and lifeless it seemed, clean white with the dean gray wings, black tailfeathers, and something proud in the head with the hard yellow eye, the authoritative yellow bill. Seen out of the corner of his eye, the post with the stiU gull stood on the sand like a 226 · The Missouri Review H.E. Francis presence staring out to sea; and if the gull moved its head, so like a cap, it startled. He would smile at how the resemblance startled. He went at last into his grandfather's house. On the kitchen table was thelinedpaper, was the chewed yellow pendl, was the blank envelope—at the place where his grandfather would have his tea, before the green wicker armchair he sat in. There was scrawl on the paper. There was the date. There was "D" in that old hand so familiar, but his grandfather had got no farther. He still had all the miscellaneous short notes written in his grandfather's hand: "Sonny, come when you can." "It's quiet here since your mother died, like when your father went, but I got my cats and Pal—and...