There once was a boy who wished to marry the sea.
Born on a sandy beach beneath a shining moon – his father dipped the newborn in the salty waves ere he saw the morn. On his first night in the world the child watched the waves and the wheeling stars and when the sea turned to gold beneath the rising sun, he laughed with rosy cheeks. It wasn’t til his mother carried him from sight of water that the babe began to wail.
They named him Thom, and he grew tall as the seasons turned.
Thom’s father had learned to catch the wind and read the stars, and he would sail ever further from home. Beyond the bay – even across the Foaming Strait – his voyages lasted for weeks. He always brought back treats and tales that made his son howl with delight.
But one day, when Thom was twelve, his father left and never returned. Each evening, they would sit on the docks. Thom would stare longingly at his beloved ocean, comforting his mother as she pined for the sight of a sail.
A year passed, and creditors claimed Thom’s father was lost at sea – and that his voyage had been uninsured. The bankers came and took every piece of furniture and all their things, and then they turned Thom and his mother from their home.
This sudden fall from grace broke the grieving woman’s heart, and abandoned by friends and fortune, life grew difficult for fourteen-year-old Thom. He made a small skiff, bought a net and spear, and became a fisherman. Larger men with bigger boats took all the best fishing spots, but Thom managed to catch enough to feed himself and his haunted mother. They dwelt in a hovel together and she had only him and he had only the sea.
“Your father left us for the lure of the ocean,” Thom’s mother would say. “Promise me, son. Promise that you’ll never sail out of sight of land.”
And so Thom fished in the bay and spoke to the sea and told it all his problems. The wind brought him whispering comfort and the waves caressed his hands as he pulled his nets.
Fat, silvery fish filled his boat. Sometimes precious things would come up with his catches – now a shiny ring, another time a box of tiny soldiers. Life became easier. He got a larger house, and a maid to care for his mother. He gave the ocean’s gifts to the poor folk on the docks, for he did not desire anything more but to spend his time with the sea.
A few years later, Thom was by his mother’s bedside, holding her bony hand as she begged him again not to sail too far. Sorrow and loss had hollowed her out, she had no strength left to live. That night she made him promise not to leave, then closed her eyes for the last time.
On his eighteenth birthday, Thom sat alone, watching the bay. The stars twinkled above, reflecting in the water. A merry zephyr gamboled about the docks, carrying the words of the sea.
“Come hither, sweet Thom. I would bear thee upon mine tides, and caress thee with mine waves. Such sights I would show thee! Let us dance together… Be with me, forever.”
A fire burned in Thom’s heart, an answer to the sweet promise of love. But he could not trust the wild ocean. He rose to his feet.
“Alas, my sainted mother has forbade it. And the fate of my father proves her concern. How can I trust a thing that has taken so much from me?”
And a warm wind rose from the heart of the great ocean. It spoke an ancient truth to the young man.
“My heart can ne’er be fathomed, and mine love cannot be divided. Your father’s affection was fickle – aye! Ever, he would return to that shore and the things he loved better – ‘twere not I that was inconstant.”
Thom finally understood his father’s inevitable fate and the anchor of his mother’s fear. And he knew that his heart was true. He loaded his skiff and left the bay, singing his love for all things.
Sailors see him sometimes, an old man in a small boat, far out on the open water. They know not to bother him lightly, lest the seas grow jealous and raise an angry storm.
For old Thom has wed the ocean.