Throwback Thursday: ‘Polycarp on the Sea’ by Stephen Case

The way I heard the story was probably wrong, because I didn’t grow up hearing stories like this, and by the time I began to it was late and the images had become confused, the metaphors mixed. I know they were mixed, because every time the side of the boat rose and fell with the waves, I saw Polycarp in the stern, gripping the rough wooden beam.

My spell-check doesn’t recognize Polycarp, but I’m sure it’s correct. I’m more sure of it than I am rudder or stern. I don’t know boats, or didn’t at first. At first it was just Polycarp, as clear as though he were sitting before me. It was hard to see the rest of the scene. I couldn’t tell how large the boat was or how the thing that steers it is formed. Sometimes it seemed barely a fishing vessel, with a sail in the centre stuck up between benches of sleeping men.

Polycarp was sitting in the stern, his hand on the wooden piece that steers the ship. He steered for them all, the other vessels of the fleet marking his sail and his wake. 

But the boats must have been larger than that, because Aeneas and all the other survivors of Troy, at least those who remained with him now, fit with their belongings on a tiny fleet of these vessels. They had room for rowers too, and they skimmed back and forth across the Mediterranean. So the ships could not have been too small. And the fleet altogether carried many men, men worth dying for. 

Either way, Polycarp — though I know it shouldn’t have been Polycarp — sat in the stern of one and was steering them all toward Italy. It was night, and there was finally a wind behind them filling the sails. The men stretched out on the rowing benches could hear the canvas snap in the breeze, and they were happy because the sound meant motion and because the wind was cool and sweet.

Somewhere below them a god looked up and watched them pass like a shadow on the sun, though the sun had fallen hours ago and was even now wheeling its way beneath him. He saw them pass like you or I might see scraps of clouds against the moon on a warm night and fancy them ships in a sea of air.