It is wooden, a gent’s, with ‘Elder Dempster’
machined then varnished into one of
the shoulders. It belonged to the shipping line
which plied between Liverpool and Lagos,
via Freetown and Accra. It was purloined,
accidentally or otherwise,
by my father or mother, possibly
the latter on her last trip home, with me
in her womb, to ensure a safer birth
in temperate climes – U-Boats permitting.
He died of septicaemia three months
after I was born – from an ill judged
operation. ‘If I had been there…’
– she was a nurse – ‘…if I had been there…’
became the refrain of her widowhood,
with its depression and eventual
alcohol. When I was small she told me,
over and over, tales of that journey –
the traders from Accra rowing alongside,
the thunderstorms breaking over the mountains
of Sierra Leone, the ship’s captain
taking the vessel out of the convoy,
heading for the Sargasso Sea then north east
for home, always in plain sight but no booty
for a U-Boat captain also heading home.
For Aristotle, tokens of whatever
kind were a poor means by which to move
the action on. Life, however, though not
often, sometimes trumps art. This wooden
token of a skeleton tells a story.
By David Selzer