The Old Man Becomes the Sea

Hannah Hadley

The trailer park was quiet. It wasn’t the stillness that you would get in the middle of a forest, because when you would step out of your mobile home with your morning coffee, the rolling sound of the Gulf waves would greet you, the tide beckoning you to sit and watch the day go by. From your perch by the bay, in your own special inlet, you could see dolphins sunning themselves on the beaches of small islands of the coast and osprey diving down from high in the skies to catch their prey from aqua waters. Manatees would make appearances sometimes, grazing on the plants that covered the seascape, gentle giants with calves, and slow-moving herds traveling past your shoreline.

Paradise.

My grandmother moved down to the Gulf to help her father, who was having a hard time getting around all by himself at age eighty-nine. It didn’t seem like a sacrifice in my eyes at first, because getting to move to your own slice of paradise seems to make up for any sort of loss, but most of her family stayed up north. This included my mother, who had just turned nineteen and was left to put herself through college the best way she could. My grandmother’s husband, my mother’s father, had died a year before creating the perfect storm to exit Illinois. But in no way was this leaving malicious, because Grandma’s father was her person, the one she could always count on for love, understanding, and affection.

Learning about my grandmother and her time in the Sunshine state helps me understand her as a person, as someone other than my mother’s mom. But it also teaches me about people I’ve never met before and wish I could meet.

“I wish you could have met him, Hannah,” my mother said to me wistfully. I could tell she was smiling through the phone speaker.

I wish I could have met him too.

Apparently, my great-grandfather led a very interesting life. When he was a teenager, he was a runner. He didn’t run track and field or deliver milk and other goods as I would have guessed. He was a runner for the famed John Dillinger, running goods and supplies to the gangster while he was in hiding. This is something that shocked me, knowing my grandmother’s gentle demeanor and the beautiful man my mother described my great-grandpa Devening to be.

But everyone has a past, right?

I’ve asked her before, multiple times, if the story was even true and she would just give me this look that oozed, “Why would I lie?”

She wouldn’t lie, but maybe his side of the family has some tall talkers. But if they believe it to be true, my mother believes it to be true, then it will be something I take as fact until it is disproven as fiction.

After his bout with Midwestern gangsters, he worked through the depression and its aftermath as a pressman, someone who made newspapers and put them through the right machines to get them out to the public. He wasn’t working in a single press for a single newspaper either, people at the time couldn’t afford that. This was work one had to travel for. So for years my great-grandpa Devening and his family, my grandmother included, lived in a mobile home, traveling where the work was like nomads, or “gypsies” as my mother said specifically. She also said my grandmother spoke fondly of this time, living free like the wind itself, so there is no wondering why they felt at home in this small retirement trailer community right off the water.

But they stayed here, growing roots deep into the earth and enjoying the sweet relaxation of the Florida lifestyle.

After his interesting and busy life, I think he found solace in his own promised land, or at least that’s what I like to think. Late into his eighties, he would drag his fold-up chair to the edge of the inlet and watch, smoking his staple cigar, taking note of the boats that left their little marina and the nature that surrounded him. Ashes would fall around him but would soon be blown away by the breeze, putting his own little piece of himself into his place of serene loveliness.

But nothing can last forever.

A couple of years later, at the age of ninety-one, he passed from this world. His family did not bury him within the earth or prop him up, pumped full of chemicals to give those loved ones left one last glance at his heavily made-up face. His ending was more poetic, something I know he deserved even though I had never met the man myself.

They chose to cremate him, to turn him into the ash that mirrored what he would blow around him at his place of leisure, and took him out into the water on a boat one last time before spreading his ashes into the Gulf. While doing this, they recited a passage from The Old Man and the Sea. His closest family, his daughters and the oldest one of my mother’s siblings, were the only ones present, leaving no room for strangers who hardly knew the man to come to pay their respects.

I thought it was beautiful.

He looked across the sea and knew how alone he was now. But he could see the prisms in the deep dark water and the line stretching ahead and the strange undulation of the calm. The clouds were building up now for the trade wind and he looked ahead and saw a flight of wild ducks etching themselves against the sky over the water, the blurring, then etching again and he knew no man was ever alone on the sea.
Ernest Hemingway

I’ve seen pictures so I can put a face to the name but I feel like I can see him in my mind’s eye, sitting in his chair by the bay. When I close my eyes, I see thick-rimmed glasses and a silvery beard. I feel the warmth of his smile and his ecstatic greeting as I walk up barefoot in the sand as he knew me as intimately as he knew my mother and her mother. I feel the salty breeze coming up from the ocean on my face as I imagine myself sitting next to him in my own chair. I feel the silence that really isn’t silence settle along my shoulders and chest like it’s hugging me because in truth I wouldn’t know what to say to him.

So we would just sit and watch the waves. But I know I couldn’t keep myself from watching him along with it. I would watch the sweet cigar smoke curl up from his sitting form, contemplating if I should say anything at all.

I shouldn’t. But maybe I would hold his frail hand, hands that have handled press machines and goods for Dillinger, hands that have molded my mother’s family unknowingly, and smile.

And I know that he’d smile back.

Hannah Hadley’s story “The Old Man Becomes the Sea” is a short story that follows the story of her great-grandfather and how he affected her mother's family. This story was read at the Lions in Winter Literary Festival this past year at EIU, where she is about to complete her first year of graduate school, getting her master's in Creative Writing.