Skulls & Bones: A Novella: Fourteen Letters from a Sailor at the End of the World

By Jay Malinowski

At the edge of the world, an ocean away, a sailor named Martel has retired to land. He clings to his most valued possession—a series of letters written to his granddaughter, whom he lost contact with long ago. Telling of their ancestral past, his life at sea, and the choices upon which their lives have been built, Martel’s letters illuminate the power of stories passed down through generations—stories that changed over time, and that ruptured their family narrative, tearing them all apart.

A multimedia project conceived by acclaimed Canadian artist and musician Jay Malinowski, this special enhanced edition of Skulls & Bones contains more than one hundred beautifully rendered pen and ink illustrations, and fourteen original songs. It is a fascinating and telling portrait of a sailor atoning for his past, uncovering truth, and finding hope in the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Sep 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781443449687

Jay Malinowski

Born in Montreal and raised in Vancouver, Jay Malinowski is a musician, visual artist, and author, who truly lets the medium deliver the message. Best known for his work as frontman of the critically acclaimed Juno Award winning band Bedouin Soundclash, Malinowski first made a name for himself as a visual artist in Toronto after graduating from Queen’s University with a degree in fine art. Skulls & Bones (Letters From a Sailor to His Long Lost Granddaughter) is his first novella. Malinowski currently resides in Vancouver, B.C.

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Skulls & Bones

Fourteen Letters From a Sailor at the End of the World

Jay Malinowski

CONTENTS

Dedication

For Those About to Drown

At the End of the World

El Inglés Goes Missing . . .

Letter 1: Skulls & Bones

SONG: Skulls & Bones

The Great Fog

Letter 2: Main-à-Dieu

SONG: Main-à-Dieu

Letter 3: Patience Phipps

SONG: Patience Phipps

Letter 4: The Tall Shadow From Saint-Malo

SONG: The Tall Shadow From Saint-Malo

Letter 5: The Chi-hua-hua de Gucci

SONG: The Chi-hua-hua de Gucci

Letter 6: The Dying Californian

SONG: The Dying Californian

Letter 7: Carnival Celebration

SONG: Carnival Celebration

Letter 8: Singapore Sling

SONG: Singapore Sling

Letter 9: Donzoko Blues

SONG: Donzoko Blues

Letter 10: Les Bas-Fonds

SONG: Les Bas-Fonds

Letter 11: The Pacific Gyre

SONG: The Pacific Gyre

Letter 12: Low, Low, Low

SONG: Low, Low, Low

Letter 13: I Was Walking Through a Dream

SONG: I Was Walking Through a Dream

Letter 14: The Reckoning

SONG: The Reckoning

A World Without End

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Dedication

Dedicated to My Grandfather,

who left behind a line of maps, scribbled notes, books, and photographs leading from Cape Breton all the way to Vancouver. If I reached a dead end, we would find a secret compartment in his old desk or a map hidden in a corner of the basement that showed a way out.

For Those About to Drown

For those about to drown, it’s good to take one last look around before letting the lungs fill with water. A simple direction—but near impossible to remember in those sinking moments. An unknown sailor was glad for this advice when he found a strong-gripping hand thrust down into the sea from the blue heavens above. Pulled-up half-conscious and laid down on the deck of a boat, the sun had never shone brighter on his waterlogged body. He could only smile, thinking of the old friend who had told him this. Before falling unconscious, the sailor saw fishermen above him—silhouettes in the bright morning sun. They were speaking in a language he couldn’t understand. He managed one last, faint smile from his cold, salty lips. Only minutes before his boat had smashed to pieces on the rocks. He thought that he was at the end of the world—but fortune found him off the coast of Spain. He stretched out his arm to shake their hands, but his body went limp from exhaustion. Then his world went black.

Looks like he’s dead, one of the fisherman said.

Nah, he’s got a pulse, said another.

"Americano?"

"No sé, said a third. He’s still breathing. Let’s head home. El Deportivo is playing, and the fish are no good today."

The fishermen carried the unknown sailor’s body from the boat and threw him like a wet fish into the back of a pickup truck—a strange catch for the day. They would take him to Finisterre, the closest village on La Costa da Morte. There was a hospital there that could treat him.

As the truck rattled down the rocky road and hit a large bump, the unknown sailor was jolted back to consciousness. His last memory was thrashing in the depths of the Atlantic. One could forgive him for being confused. He lay still, staring up into the blue sky, fearing that the afterlife had turned out to be the back of a pickup. He propped himself up as the truck veered down the first switchback in the high cliffs that wound down to the village.

Below he saw a lighthouse on a rocky point; he rubbed his eyes. Beyond, the Atlantic Ocean shimmered like diamonds in the Spanish sun. Although not a religious man, he smiled at Providence. Thanks be to the hand of the fishermen, he thought. For like a great baptism, the once drowning man near death found rebirth—and all the dumb luck in the world couldn’t have brought him here, something must have done that work for him. Yes, he confirmed, for those about to drown it’s good to take one final look around—because the end of the world was the most beautiful place he had ever seen.

At the End of the World

At the end of the world there is a port called Finisterre. Finis Terrae; Latin for end of earth, named by the Romans when this was the furthest west anyone could venture. Of course, now we know the world is round. Now we know there is more beyond the horizon than endless ocean and the forgotten Greek god of the sea, Poseidon. But standing on these high cliffs on the westernmost tip of Spain, the earth does appear to plummet into the sea forever. Through the fog, which constantly envelops the Galician coast, the swirling light of the lighthouse on Cape Finisterre comes into view. Below, small fishing dories appear out of the mist, bobbing endlessly in the waves below. They have bobbed here for centuries.

A steep and treacherous road winds down into the village. No one maintains it, as it’s hardly used; most people arrive here by sea. Some wish they hadn’t. Sailors from the north are warned of this coast, where the waves punish the cliffs and the undertow is merciless. Many of the souls blown off course or lost in the fog paid with their lives. They now lie scattered beneath the waves in the graveyard of ships’ hulls on the seabed. But some made it to shore . . . and they called this coastline La Costa da Morte.

This is the Dead Coast.

At Finisterre there is a slight flattening of the land and a rocky point that protects the harbour. There are rows of little white houses and apartments with terracotta roofs huddled together in the cove. It is a small refuge from the vast, unknown sea beyond. Narrow cobbled streets snake down the steep inclines of the cliffs to the shoreline of the harbour where there is a seawall and a small plaza mayor.

On this flattening of land in the plaza mayor, next to an old fountain built before time cared to remember, is the café. In the early hours before dawn, the first sound in the village will be the café shutters opening. Then the sound of sweeping. Then the chairs that were stacked neatly the night before will be set out on the terrace, next to the fountain.

The owner of the café keeps the same hours as the fishermen. He opens early and stays late for the men who return weary from the sea. They come to watch the football matches of the Coruña provincial club, El Deportivo. If the weather is good, the old television will be brought out onto the terrace. In a storm they will be crammed inside—packed like a tin of sardines. They smoke Fortuna cigarettes with that distinct taste, and drink pungent whiskey and Licor Cuarenta y Tres. Their clothes, hands, and hair are permanently brined from the salt of the sea. They sit into the night debating la Copa.

They don’t have the same heart as us, one man says as he sucks on the shell of a prawn, we could take it if we had Madrid’s money. Then, throwing the shell on the ground and grinding it with his boot, he concludes, but money rules the world, not the heart. These dreams pass the time and keep their minds off the next morning’s work. They will wake before dawn to be out on the sea by sunrise.

While the men go to sea, the women stay on shore. They collect shellfish. From here to Cambados the mariscadoras can be found in the tidal flats. Dressed in their rubber boots, they dig with spoons. They dig until their backs ache. Mussels, clams, scallops, creatures in between they call berberechos—it’s some extra money for the home while the men are at sea catching the bigger fish. Men don’t collect shellfish. That is tradition. It might seem strange to the tourists who come down from the north—red-faced and sunburnt in the summer months—but this is tradition. Tourists come and go—traditions don’t.

The days at the café are slow. In the afternoons, when the men are at sea and the women are at the shore, the older men of the village come to read the news from far-off Madrid. But the ups and downs of the markets, and the politics and the terrors of that world seem far away next to the breaking of the sea.

To the left or to the right, one man moans, these politicians are like the rolling hull of a ship! They turn their backs on those troubles, tossing aside El País, El Mundo, and La Voz. Those papers collect dust for another day while they scour the words in the sports paper of El Marca. What we need is direction, another Luisito or Pahiño. Some good direction—a good captain. Someone to get us back in the first division. That’s what we need. It’s 1985 and their beloved Deportivo de La Coruña has been suffering in dark times for too long. Something has to give, they all say. Over time it has just been relegation. And now the times must change.

As for time itself, that has not touched this place. Or perhaps, time has forgotten it.

Day in and day out, the days remain the same. The café opens at dawn and closes when the last fisherman leaves. There is no change. No change, except one: a girl named Ana. She does not collect shellfish. She clears the plates at the café. Her mother washes and cooks in the kitchen. Her life is much like the others in Finisterre. Her family has lived here for generations. She tried to count back once—her father was a fisherman, and his father was one, too, and the one before that, but before that, no one knows. She hasn’t seen her father in years. One day he went to sea and never returned. That day everything changed.

The loss was difficult on Ana. It was difficult on her mother. It was still a man’s world—the last vestiges of the old ways, of an old dictator, were still felt strongly in the home. There was women’s work and there was men’s work. But now there was no money coming in from the sea. Luckily, Ana’s uncle ran the café. He decided that clearing plates and cooking in the kitchen would be acceptable women’s work. Be grateful for the work we were given by your uncle, Anita, her mother said to her. At one time I couldn’t even open a bank account.

So before and after school Ana cleared the plates, floating amongst the conversations of the village. Sometimes she feels like her life ended before it began. This is the Dead Coast, she muttered one day on her way home from work, everything ends here. She did not want to work at the café all her life like her mother has. But she knew that meant she would have to leave. There was no place for her in the ways of the past, and the past is all there is here, she concluded. Everyone young must leave, she thought. The village was slowly ebbing away.

El Inglés Goes Missing . . .

Every evening Ana walked along the seawall. She stared out across the Atlantic. From here, it sometimes looked like the ocean dropped off a cliff. But God might have told them differently, if he cared, she thought. Her future was somewhere over that horizon, somewhere far away.

It was her final year at school, and like many her age, she knew that soon she would have to leave. Her life was so uncertain. Sometimes she felt that her life was at the edge of a tall cliff and that she might plummet into the sea without anyone noticing. She thought about leaving Finisterre—she could move somewhere else, maybe Madrid. She heard the young people talk about finding work there while they drank in the evenings at the café. But in a big city, who would care about her? There is a sadness in knowing that where you are from may not be the place you end up calling home—a great, nostalgic sadness.

Her thoughts turned to the old man, El Inglés. He had washed up here one year ago, having come from abroad. He was the only resident of the village who had ever come from abroad. Ana had asked at the café about him.

He came here, washed up, said one man. Washed up on the rocks like the rest of us, the man laughed.

He’s a real barnacle! said another. Perfect for this place.

I heard he only speaks three words of Spanish, said a