An excerpt from The Shieling.
The sun had set an hour earlier, but the light in the western sky lingered, as if nature itself couldn’t bear the thought of ending such a beautiful day. David stood on the shore, waiting until the last bit of light had faded away leaving a dark, moonless night with not a breath of wind, not a ripple on the smooth surface of the silent sea. A deep, abiding stillness had settled over their world.
He went back to the shieling, lit the hurricane lamp, and put it in the window. “Do you have a few minutes?” he asked Catriona. “There’s something I think you’d like to see.”
Catriona, who had been sitting in the rocking chair next to the fire, put down her notebook, took his hand, and followed him into the night. A few steps took them down to the shore. David gestured at the boat. With a smile and a shrug, Catriona climbed in. He gave the boat a gentle push, then hopped in with her. As the boat glided into the darkness, the only sound was the faint lapping of water against the sides. David slipped the oars into the oarlocks and began pulling them out to sea, dipping the oars so gently that they made only the slightest whisper.
When they were a quarter mile out, he shipped the oars. They floated in a stillness broken only by the barely perceptible heave of the sea lifting them up and easing them down in broad, flowing undulations.
They turned their eyes upward, where an explosion of stars stretched in every direction. The Milky Way glowed like a warm pathway of silver arcing across the heavens. The North Star, the Big Dipper, even Cassiopeia broke anchor and fairly leapt from the sky. Nor was the sky the only source of wonder. The surface of the dark sea was alive with glitters and sparkles, a million tiny, ever-changing splashes of light, a rolling palette reflecting the light of the stars in shifting patterns.
A speck on the silent sea, they were gone, lost, adrift. David had rowed them to oblivion, to a world devoid of color and motion, enfolded in a silence so profound they could almost feel it. The scrape of a shoe, the creak of the hull, and the shifting on an oar were not enough to break the spell. The night was so alive, the silence so charged, that it was as if life, in all its plenitude and promise, was reaching out to them, smiling in gentle reproach at all the unlocked doors they had never bothered to open.
After a time, Catriona put a cautious hand on the gunwale, tiptoed forward, and sat next to him. Together they leaned back, reclining on blankets, staring upwards, suspended between the dark, deep, unseen and unknowable sea below and the intimidating sprawl of the infinite and sublime heavens above. For hours they lay there, silent and spellbound, communicating only with the flash of an eye or the squeeze of a hand. Their only connection to the world they left behind was the golden thread of light from the hurricane lamp in their window reaching out to them across the smooth surface of the dark sea.
Somewhere during the long hours of the night, Catriona tore her eyes from the sky and turned to David. “It makes you feel so small,” she whispered, as if recognizing that the insignificance of their lives was something in which they might take comfort rather than offense.
Michael J. Collins is an orthopedic surgeon and author of The Shieling and All Bleeding Stops.
