Old Sea
by Ryan Stearne
The old man sat with the boy on the terrace where they could smell the faint odour of the distant shark factory on the wind, talked about baseball and fishing, and had beers. He hadn’t caught a fish in eighty-four days and was salao, the worst kind of unlucky.
“You will be successful tomorrow,” the boy said.
“Maybe,” the old man said.
“It has been nearly eighty-five days and tomorrow the number is lucky. I’ll work alongside you.”
“You cannot go with me tomorrow. You’re with a lucky boat and must stay with them.”
“I will get you the sardines, ready the lines, and carry the tackle.”
“I thank you, but I’ll do it.”
They left the terrace and walked up the hill toward the old man’s shack together, where he would sleep thinking about fish.
The old man set himself in his chair while the boy looked on.
“You must eat something.”
“I’ve fished without eating many times.”
The old man had fallen asleep and the boy thought that although his strange shoulders show the weight of his great age, he is still strong.
“I have brought dinner,” said the boy.
“You’re kind.”
“It’s black beans and rice, fried bananas, and some stew.”
“Who ought we thank for our dinner tonight?”
“It was Martin, but I’ve already thanked him for us both.”
“He has done this for us before,” said the old man.
“Can you tell me again about baseball the time the great Joe DiMaggio came here”
When the boy had gone the old man fell asleep, he didn’t dream about the great fish or his wife. Instead he dreamed of lions.
“Do you want some coffee? We have credit,” said the boy.
They put the gear into the skiff and walked to the early morning place that served fishermen coffee from condensed milk cans. The old man drank slowly, knowing that it was all he would have all day and he should take it.
“Good luck old man.”
“Good luck.”
The old man steadily rowed the skiff out of the harbour and toward the deep wells where the ocean dropped to seven hundred fathoms and all sorts of fish congregated and the tuna would feed. He baited the hooks with the boy’s excellent sardines and looped the lines onto green-sapped sticks while birds swooped for fish. Dolphins are driving fish up, he thought. His lines went straight into the dark of the water, straighter than anyone’s.
“My big fish must be somewhere.”
The sun was higher in the sky and shone just so the light broke into prisms against the surface of the water. Behind the boat a deadly Portugese man-of-war was trailing its iridescent bubbles which the old man had always thought were beautiful but could catch in the line and give fishermen welts and sores that felt like whiplash. The bird was back, circling high. Only the loggerheads can eat the filaments, he thought.
Just then the stern line came taught and the stick dipped. The small tuna was aboard and he hit it on the head for kindness. With the beautiful tuna bait he dropped his line back into the deep, dark water.
He felt the delicate first pull of the sardine on the line.
“Don’t be shy, fish.”
The gentle pull became unbelievably heavy and strong and the direction the fish travelled was down toward the deep, unrolling the first of two reserve coils. The great fish had perhaps been hooked many times before, the old man thought.
“Now I’ll let him eat it well.”
The great fish had the hook in the side of its mouth and began towing the skiff east, away from Havana and the man braced against the thwart with the line across his shoulders.
“He doesn’t know I’m an old man and alone.”
The sun was high but soon it was down and it was night and cold so he bundled himself. The glare of Havana was visible against the darkness of the horizon. I wish the boy was here, he thought. I am the towing bitt.
The first edge of the sun rose and the fish was now heading north and the man would not have to face it. The fish was not tiring and would not.
“Fish,” he said, “I’ll stay with you until I am dead.”
At this the fish made a lurch and pulled the old man down onto his face and cut him. The blood ran down his cheek and coagulated just above his chin. The old man’s hand was also bleeding as the rush of coils had given him line burn and ripped his flesh. He braced against the stern of the skiff and severed the other lines.
“Are you as tired as me, my friend?” he asked.
A bird landed on the line across his shoulders and left, headed toward the shore and the hawks.
Out here, I have three brothers: my hands and the fish. My left hand is cramped and is humiliating me with its treachery.
“Perhaps you need something to eat,” he said aloud.
He let go the line with his left and took it with his right, stretching for thin strips of the bonito at the stern. He chewed and rubbed the left hand mechanically against his trousers and it uncramped.
“Bad news, fish.”
The line rose and then the surface of the ocean bulged and the fish came out. In the sun, the lavender head and purple stripes of the body showed how wide the fish was and the rapier re-entered the water, smoothly. He is very big, but I am smart.
“I wish I could show you what sort of man I am, brother.”
The marlin had jumped and the old man had seen its acrobatics but the great fish was not so desperate and not tired by the fight, and made a return for the depth of the sea. The only wish that the old man had was that the fish would sleep and he could rest. Even here on the ocean, sleep would bring him lions. Why is it only lions? He rebaited the short line at the stern and threw the hook into the water as he knew he would need to eat again if the fish lasted another night or risk getting beaten.
“If you’re not tired, fish, you must be very strange, but we are dead even.”
I’ll show you what a man endures and just before dark the short line was taken.
He pushed the blade of his knife into the dorado’s head quickly and placed one of his feet on top of the fish and slit it open vent to maw. A trail of phosphorescent guts sank. The stars were phosphorescent too and the old man was thankful that man didn’t need to kill the sky. The moon and the sun and the stars. We only need to kill our brothers of the sea.
“I will eat the dorado and you have not eaten, friend, and then I will sleep.”
He looked at the slant of the cord and allowed himself to think the fish was slower. Rest yourself and I will do the same and tomorrow I will kill you. The pain in his shoulders had become dullness and he felt sorry for the fish.
At first he didn’t dream of the lions but instead a vast school of porpoises that stretched for miles and miles but he soon began to dream of that long yellow beach and the first of the lions came down onto the beach in the early dusk and then the other lions came down.
His face was in the dorado. The jerk of the cord had pulled him there and he woke. He braced his knees against the side of the skiff and rose steadily to his feet. Circling.
“You better be confident, old man,” he said, “the circles will get shorter.”
The great fish was jumping and he would leap high to return through the same hole he had made in the water on leaping. The old man braced and held the line.
Each circle was closer to the boat than the last and in each the old man’s pain was greater. But I’m able to control my pain and your pain will be your death. He was faint and tireder than he had ever been. He felt agony and his head felt light and his mouth felt dry so he could hardly speak but the water was too far. He would bring the bulk of the fish alongside on the boat and when close enough he would harpoon him through the heart.
“Fish, do you have to kill me too?”
The fish came alongside and turned over and to the old man and the man drove his harpoon down into the heart. He had accomplished it. He had to rope his brother.
“Get to work, old man.”
He untied the harpoon from the bitt and cut the line short and looped it through the gills and out his jaws and knotted the double rope to the bitt at the bow. He tied the tail astern and the rest of the fish to the middle thwart. The old man’s eyes looked as detached as a saint’s in procession but there was work to do and he stepped up the mast and readied the sails. The trade winds would keep as south-west and soon he would be at home. He sailed for an hour before the first shark hit.
“Dentuso, shark, bad luck to your mother.”
The large Mako shark came with a high fin and eight rows of teeth and the old man rammed the harpoon in. His brother’s body had been mutilated.
“I’m sorry for killing you, fish.”
But he was born a fisherman and the fish was born a fish and so it was. Perhaps it was a sin to have killed the great fish, he thought. He had loved the fish when it was alive and he still loved it after he had killed it. Was it a sin to kill something you loved? The forward fish had not been destroyed and it was the good part of the fish and he knew that the bad time was coming.
The two brown triangular fins cut the surface and he knew the appetite that came. He lashed his knife to the oar and took it up.
“Come on galanos,” he said and stabbed down.
The sea was suddenly awash with blood.
“I shouldn’t have killed you.”
The knife blade broke in the last shovelnose and went under and was gone. All the old man could do now was seize the club. It was made from a broken oar sawed off to two and half feet and he could use it only effectively with one hand because of the grip.
“It will do no good but I’ll fight them.”
The galanos came as phosphorescence in the dark and snapped at the fish. He clubbed the rubbery rigidity of the sharks and clubbed until his shoulder hurt and until the club was seized. What can a man do against the sharks in the dark without a weapon, he thought. I am too tired to fight.
“You still have much luck yet,” he said.
And prayers that I promised if I caught the fish.
He took the tiller and swung it hard until he heard it break and the last of the sharks was finally gone. There was nothing left for the sharks to eat. In the dark he could see the lights of his home port and bed, he thought.
“I went too far out.”
He made land, the lights of the terrace were out and there was no one to help him.
In the morning, the boy found the old man in his bed.
“Don’t sit up,” the boy said.
“They beat me, Manolin.”
“The fish did not beat you though. He was eighteen feet from nose to tail.”
“I missed you.”
“Get your hands well and we will fish together again.”
After the boy left, the old man fell back asleep and dreamed about lions.
Author Statement
Digital Humanities, and computational analysis specifically, have opened a broad array of opportunities for the literary analyst. With a few key strokes, a literary corpus can be pored over in a way that traditional reading would require years. One of the key aspects often examined in this type of analysis is the author signal, an ineffable term endowed with a seemingly otherworldly quality but really just relating to the way in which a given author strings their words together. Within the most common of words and punctuation, those often glossed over by a reader in favour of the flashier noun or verb, the author is most prominent. Often this type of computational analysis is used in author attribution, attempting to correlate anonymously written works to known authors. Of course, this has proven unreliable and fails to address my question as a creative writer: if the author signal is calculable, is it replicable?
Is it possible to recreate style based on computational analysis. That’s what “Old Sea” is at its core, an attempt to use data to rewrite Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea as a short story. Hemingway’s immediately recognisable and brusque style made him an immediate candidate to test my stylometry-based hypothesis. When you read Hemingway, you know you are reading Hemingway. Yet, his simplicity is also an exercise in literary sleight of hand, resonating emotionally in a style that seems effortless. What I mean is that Hemingway’s deliberations encompass an exercise in both inclusion and excision. The omitted words are equally as important as those set in the final type.
His deliberations sat in the background as I worked through tokenizing every word and piece of punctuation, calculated the frequency and proximity of words, and sentence length and structure. The presence of his authorial intent made me wonder how I would go about finally writing my own exercise in excision. There were decisions I would have to make as I carved Hemingway’s original 26,582 words set in 1,923 sentences down to 2,026 words set in 146 sentences. My own authorial intent is still present in the final text of “Old Sea.” It appears in the moments of the original I abandoned and as a dialogue between the pieces. However, these judgments were still predicated on computational analysis, which provided clarity as I sought to streamline The Old Man and the Sea. I allowed the computer to dictate ranked importance and which words were remnant.
I know that there is a fallibility inherent in the final product, as I didn’t make the decisions that Hemingway would have if tasked similarly. Perhaps what is left is only an uncanny imposter. But this wasn’t an exercise in being Hemingway, so his deliberations were finally unimportant beyond the words he finally included. It was an attempt to see the limits of computational analysis’s ability to produce work fomented in data. To create a replica.
Old Sea is available out of print from The Blasted Tree Store
Featured by The Blasted Tree: March 22, 2022
Ryan Stearne
Contributing Author
Old Sea by Ryan Stearne is a Blasted Tree original short story.
ISBN [Digital]: 978-1-987906-83-7
Cover Design by Kyle Flemmer