A Handful of Seawater

By Ron Frazer

Life & Its Meaning

On the Caribbean island of Grenada, Morgan is fending for himself, an orphan, the poorest of the poor in a poverty-stricken country. After living on the streets for a few years following the death of his mother, he meets Alden, a grizzled, old fisherman with a zen-master presence who takes him on as an apprentice.

As Morgan searches for someone to replace the affection lost when his mother died, he slowly learns the meaning of life through a series of adventures and misadventures. At every reversal of fortune, Alden helps him see the bigger picture. He shows Morgan, and the reader, the joy to be found in simple things—even a handful of seawater.

While the story is fictional, most events are based on the people the author met while teaching math and science at a secondary school following the 1983 intervention in which the US military drove out the former communist government. This was the first of Ron Frazer seven novels.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ron Frazer
• Release date: Nov 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781540135810

Ron Frazer

Ron Frazer's novels are written for women who have lived long enough to have a few regrets, He has studied religion and psychology for the last forty years, so his books always have an intimate, spiritual element that is always positive, often involving women taking control of their lives, even entire countries. Every book celebrates women as a positive force in their culture.Ron has traveled widely in 29 countries, lived in four of them and in several US states. He doesn't consider himself an expert on women, but, having been married three times with three adult daughters, probably has learned more about their concerns than have most men. He has been an engineer, a yoga teacher, a financial planner, a photographer, and a computer security researcher. Along the way, he accumulated four college degrees, but could never figure out what he wanted to be when he grew up.Follow Ron on Twitter at https://twitter.com/RonFrazerAuthor, or read first chapters of each novel at www.ronfrazer.com.

Book preview

Chapter 1: The Counterfeit Sock

Sitting on a creaking stool, Morgan used a rusted machete to slice ten inches from the sleeve of a faded, black jersey. He peered into the predawn gloom of the other room to see if his uncle Sean stirred from the noise, but the old man, smelling of rum, sweat and urine, was sprawled on his bed in yesterday’s clothes, still drunk from the night before.

Only the orange glow of a candle relieved the gloom of the unpainted shack. The single layer of grimy boards that formed both the outer and inner walls of the two small rooms reflected almost no light. The underside of the tin roof, blackened with forty years’ accumulation of soot from kerosene lamps and candles, reflected even less.

It was Monday. Morgan took his only secondary school uniform from a plastic grocery bag that hung from a nail in the wall. He put on the clean, white, but rumpled shirt, and the gray, hand-me-down slacks that ended an inch above his ankle. The pants were tight; he had trouble with the button and the fly.

After putting on his left sock and shoe, he arranged the severed sleeve on his right foot so the elastic cuff ringed his ankle. He slipped on the right shoe, but the sleeve refused to look like a sock. He stood and looked down. Even by candlelight, the pants revealed the deceit. The sock had fallen into a pile against the top of the scuffed leather. He tugged at his pants to lower them a little but could not make them reach the top of the sock.

He knew his mother would never have let him go to school looking like this. She would have found some way to get him a uniform that fit. He remembered her fussing over his clothes and combing his hair. She had become a gentle memory of a large, vague presence exuding a feeling of being cared for and protected.

She had died ten years ago when Morgan was five. He had forgotten her face. What remained were only hazy memories, flashes of time, a second here or there—her smoothing his shirt before they walked out the door to go to church, a kind word, a plate of food. As he struggled to picture his mother’s face, the image faded into that of the government social worker who had forced him to live with his worthless uncle.

Morgan combed his hair while looking in the hand mirror, rimmed in pink plastic, that hung on a nail in the wall between the two rooms. He hated his face; it was too black. He grimaced, mocking his two missing front teeth. As his fingers traced the keloid scar on his cheek, he glared into his own eyes until the skin disappeared. Only the eyes remained.

He poked a chunk of bread into one cheek, put a little saltfish in his mouth and blew out the candle. He stepped through the decaying door onto the rock that served as a front step, and closed the latch without a sound. He exhaled deeply to rid himself of the stink of his uncle and the mildew of the shack. He took several deep breaths to fill his lungs with the moist, musty trade winds that were blowing the morning mists from the jungle-covered mountains. Making sure he stepped only on the silent, stable rocks, he stopped at the back of the shack where he was hidden from the street. He reached under the shack to retrieve the soup can that kept his money safe from the old man, took a dollar for his lunch and slid the can back into its hiding place.

Standing on a hill that rose a hundred yards above the town of Victoria, Morgan looked west across the town toward the sea as the sun broke over the mountain behind him. The turquoise of the Caribbean glittered as the sun danced on the white sand below the clear, shallow water that sloshed silently against the shore as if the vast sea were a small lake. As the sun rose further above the mountain, it flooded the beach with pink light that blazed on the galvanized steel roof of the little house where he once lived with his parents. He stared at it a moment, wanting some feeling to come but was refused. He returned to chewing his bread and saltfish as he began his walk to school.

About 100 feet along the broken asphalt road that wound down the hill to the town, he stopped to rinse his mouth at a standpipe. A rotund woman in a tight, translucent slip was washing a naked baby. He watched her huge breasts wobbling from side to side as she rinsed the baby and filled a plastic pitcher for her family’s breakfast. After she moved away, he rinsed his mouth leisurely, spit into the trash that lined the ditch, then drank several handfuls of water, enough to last him until he reached the school.

The road was coming alive. Women were washing, cooking or heading out to their gardens with baskets on their heads and machetes in hand. Younger women who were no longer in school were braiding each other's hair and laughing. Men sat on boulders along the road, some alone, some talking in small groups, smoking while waiting for their women to go to work so they could head for the rum shop without hearing their wives complain.

Morgan continued down the cratered road into the town, always looking down to make sure of his footing. Once there, he walked five blocks through the narrow streets that contained the concrete houses of the village elite—the taxi drivers, shop owners, and government workers.

As he reached the main road, he turned right toward his school. It was cool in the shade of the cliffs as he left the voices of the village behind him. Small waves slapped against the rocks to his left. He stood for a moment and listened to the drone of small outboard motors. Looking back, he saw three skiffs full of fishermen heading out to sea.

After Morgan walked a quarter mile, Victoria was out of sight. He paused to lean against the cliff that rose like a great stone wall at the right edge of the road. He looked at the western horizon, admiring the peaceful infinity of the sea. He felt a part of that sea, a part of the wind; he felt at home. He didn't feel that way in the stinking shack, nor did he feel like he was a part of his school. It was only at sea that he felt alive. With a sigh, he resumed his walk, scuffing his feet in the gravel of the road.

After another quarter mile, a flatbed Bedford truck came from behind and rattled past him, swirling a cloud of dust. It carried the children from the village who could afford fifty cents for the ride. The red, yellow and green truck had no seats, just six two-by-twelve boards forming crude benches shaded by a canvas canopy. Morgan watched the bottoms of the schoolgirls bouncing on the planks as the wheels hit pothole after pothole.

A half-hour later, when Morgan reached the Waltham Secondary School, the teachers were already taking attendance. The children were lined up in their separate classes on the grassy slope between two long concrete shelters that housed the classrooms. There were three classrooms in each building with walls of rusted wire mesh on the east and west sides to let the trade winds pass through. The north and south walls were concrete with chalkboards made of pressboard, painted black.

The principal, Mrs. Phillips, was making announcements.

As Morgan slunk along the building, trying to pass invisibly behind the group, the other children turned and snickered. He found his place in line. All the children in his class smiled in his direction to help draw the teacher’s attention to his tardiness.

Before that could happen, Thomas, the class clown standing right behind him, noticed his right foot. Pointing, he proclaimed to the class, What man! You think dat a proper sock!

A brief wave of snickering drifted through the class. Another boy bent down to get a better look, Naa, man! Dat a sleeve, you know! Look man! Morgan make a new sock!

The snickering grew louder then faded into whispers. Morgan hung his head, but not in shame. He was a junkyard dog of a boy; his anger brought his shoulders up and his head down. He glared at his persecutors through his eyebrows as he imagined the punches that he would land if he could. The scar on his face, his unblinking eyes, and the thin line of white where his snarl exposed his teeth would have silenced them if the principal had not moved in their direction and ended the whispers. She stood in front of Morgan and stared at the class with her not another word from any of you expression.

Mrs. Philips was a large, kind and sympathetic woman who knew Morgan’s story. She watched Morgan’s face change from rage to embarrassment. Three girls were pointing at his feet. Mrs. Philips stepped back a few steps to study Morgan’s feet, her head tilted to the left. The walk to the school had so stretched the elastic that the sock now looked very much like a sleeve. She wagged her finger at the class with a look on her face that would silence the rowdiest of them.

I think Morgan is a very resourceful fellow, you know! You children could all take a lesson from him. What would you do if you found yourself with only one sock? She sucked her teeth as if to say that she had little hope for them. I think Morgan is very creative.

She had shamed them for the moment, but the students began laughing once they were dismissed to go to their first class. Morgan wanted to go back home and change into his shorts and T-shirt so he could go fishing with Alden, but he knew that by then the old man would have been well out to sea. He went to his first class and pretended to listen.

Throughout the long, angry morning, he overheard Thomas and the others making sporadic jokes about him. At lunchtime, he walked down to a shop and bought a piece of bread and a grape drink. It felt good to get away from the other students.

As he chewed the bread, he thought about how much he hated going to school. He appreciated the kindness of Mrs. Phillips, but it was not enough to soothe the pain of being ridiculed by boys with mothers. Throughout the morning, he despised the nicely pressed pants that Thomas wore and thought the polished black shoes made the pantywaist look like a girl in church. Morgan was jealous of all the boys. Some of them were dressed better than others, but they all looked better than him.

By the afternoon, the students had grown tired of joking about the sock, so they left Morgan alone. But Morgan had not let it go; he continued to think of ways to get back at them—ways that he would never put into action.

The closing bell rang. The Victoria students walked out to stand by the main road where they waited for the Bedford truck to collect them on its way south to Victoria. The students from the northern villages formed another little group, waiting for a bus going the opposite way.

Morgan slipped along the edge of the crowd to start the walk back to Victoria. He could hear Thomas beginning to shout some joke about him for the benefit of the others, but the words became muffled and lost in the ensuing laughter. As Morgan neared the first rum shop, the gaiety of the students was replaced by the rush of the sea breaking against the rocks to his right.

Further down the road, he walked past five houses, evenly spaced along the road about fifty feet apart; there were two wooden shacks and three small concrete bungalows, all unpainted but neat. They were located on a slight slope about thirty feet from the road where the land rose up into the jungle. The earth around each house was swept clean. The bare feet of the ever-present mothers and children had packed it hard and smooth. As in villages throughout the island, the people lived outside; the houses were just for sleeping and storing their few possessions. Only a few old people and the rich lived in their houses during the day.

As he passed by, Morgan watched the small children laughing as they chased each other around the houses, and the mothers watching over them. One heavy woman was pressing a friend’s hair using a metal comb heated on a small coal fire beside her to keep the heavy comb at the right temperature. As each woman spoke, the other would laugh. The woman holding the comb laughed like his mother, a loud, open-mouthed HAH!—just a single sound, sharp like a dog’s bark.

As he walked further into the silence of the road, he thought again of his classmates and their mothers fussing over their meals and appearance as they left for school. The other boys may not have fathers, but they all had mothers. His mind drifted to memories of his mother—of pressing against the great wall of her back as she slept next to him. He ached for someone to care that he ate and washed. He wanted to be touched the way his mother’s hand would stroke his hair or squeeze his shoulder when she sent him to play. 

Morgan stopped; something had drawn his attention. He looked around, wondering what it was. He was walking along the sea in the one stretch where there was nothing man-made except the road. The angry and lonesome thoughts drifted into a sense of freedom—of being by the sea, listening to its soothing voice. He crossed the road to sit on a large rounded rock that lay half-buried