Recipes for a Voyage to the Far Shore

By Jared Oliver Adams

Standing attention middeck with the rest of the crew on this gloomy morning, it’s hard not to recall the festival atmosphere that used to accompany our departures to the Far Shore. At daybreak, the town’s brass band would lead the parade of the dead. Throngs of onlookers tossed red saffron powder into the air to shower the families bearing the brightly wrapped bodies of their loved ones. Once the deceased were loaded into the hold, and the monk pronounced the Triumphal Words, the living passengers would ascend the gangway to the ship, dressed in their finest clothing and seasoned with saffron dust. A cacophony of well wishes accompanied them.

Tears too, of course.

There were always plenty of those.

But mixed with the celebration as they were, they were but a pinch of salt in a cake, serving only to bring out the joyful sweetness of the event.

Vendors used to sell colorful flags, and the crowd’s waving as we pulled away from the dock seemed like a turbulent rainbow. One particular town made paper mache boats held aloft on sticks that rode above the flags like a sea.

Today, however, there is no parade. A pair of monks quietly unloads a cart of bodies into the hold like so many logs, the families of the dead too embarrassed to accompany them for such an outdated tradition. The morning is overcast, chilly, and reeks of the fish being cleaned further down the pier. When the monks are finished with the bodies, one of them sniffles her way through The Triumphal Words, wiping her nose no fewer than five times during her recitation:

          On this shore, life is decay,
          our days bought in blood
          from the slaughter of beasts,
          and the ripping of plants from the ground.

          Yet now to the Far Shore, do these faithful depart.
          In hope they voyage, to pierce the veil
          and be forever beyond decay.

          There, the asleep shall wake.
          There, the broken be whole.
          There, the bound be free.
          From here, to eternity.

There is only one passenger to repeat the last line according to custom. “From here to eternity,” the girl slurs through lopsided lips. Hurreini is six years old. The porters carry her up the gangway on a litter. Her eyes bulge crookedly, but her smile as she passes steals my heart. It carries every bit of exultation the monk lacked. An entire parade of flag-waving, saffron-throwing elation is present in her face. Smiles cascade down the crew line in her wake. She tries to wave a painfully curled hand, but this sets her coughing. The porters carry her belowdecks to her room, and my gaze shifts to the pier, where the captain waits for other passengers who do not come.

Dew glitters on the captain’s silver hair, tight in its bun, her yellow navy uniform with its red sash as pristine as her posture. It is only when the monks leave with their cart that her posture breaks. “All aboard,” she declares bitterly as she trudges back onto the ship, “for paradise.”

The head steward always decorates the passenger’s bunks with the person’s favorite flower, and I always make a nod to the flower choice in the welcome cake I leave on their bedside table. I visit Hurreini in her quarters soon after departure. She is propped in the corner of her bunk, looking at the small cake in her lap, garlands of pressed cherry blossoms hanging on the wall beside her head.

She hasn’t taken a single bite of the cake.

“Are you feeling seasick?” I ask, proffering my tray. “I have mint tea and candied ginger.”

She flops her head awkwardly to the side to look at me. “Can you make me another cake?” she asks. “This one is too glorious to eat.”

I set down the tray and sit on the end of her bed. “Truth to tell, I have very little to do. I can make you a glorious cake for every meal if you like.”

She twitches her head, and I realize she’s trying to say ‘no.’

“Can you make just regular?”

“It’d be my pleasure.”

“I want to save this one for the Shore.”

“I’ll tell you what. When we get there in three weeks, I’ll make you a fresh one.”

“Can I keep this one?”

“Of course.”

On the sixth night, Hurreini wants to be carried to the dining room. We lay out the table service, all ten silver utensils framing a porcelain plate containing three perfect slices of bacon and a triangle of grilled cheese. Unbeknownst to her, I threw away four grilled cheese sandwiches before I settled on this one. It is golden all around, without a hint of crust.  She sheepishly asks if we can start with dessert, and I can’t help but laugh, which makes her smile in return.

“Certainly,” I say.

I go back to the galley, scoop the pudding into a crystal bowl etched in mountains and clouds, then, after a moment’s hesitation, sprinkle it with the slightest bit of cinnamon. When I place it in front of her, she reaches out to touch my arm.

“Could you eat with me? It’s awfully big in here.”

The dining room was made for twenty passengers, with enough room for waitstaff to push carts between the tables. “It is awfully big, isn’t it?” I say. I look to the steward standing beside the door, and he shrugs. “I’d love to eat with you.” The crew meal isn’t for another two hours; I have plenty of time.

When I sit down with my pudding, I see her studying her crystal bowl. She’s waited for me to sit before taking a bite.

“What’s it like?” she asks.

“I always thought butterscotch tasted like a snooze by a warm fire,” I say.

“No,” she says, tracing the mountains on the bowl. “The Shore. What’s it like?”

 “Oh, you’d have to ask a monk about that,” I say. “All you see onboard is an outline of mountains through the fog. We lower the passengers in the bay and the tide takes them in.”

Hurreini’s normal posture is crooked and hunched, but she collapses even more at my answer. She looks so, so small. I rush to amend my response. “Do you know what I think though?”

She looks up.

“I think it’s very colorful, like the most perfect autumn leaves, but all year round. And every single tree is bursting with fruits and nuts, kinds we’ve never tasted before. And the wind blows just enough to dance with the branches and send the smell of the flowers swirling through the air.”

I have her attention now. Her eyes gleam as I talk about the grass caressing your feet, and the wind singing you to sleep. Over her head, however, I see the steward by the doorway, twisting his lips in derision and shaking his head to himself at how I am choosing to plate this particular dish. Amur is his name. He’s young, fresh out of military service, where the charts of new theology with their afterlife tiers are nailed to the mast. I probably just lost a tier for heresy of imagination. Hurreini, though, she’d be way at the bottom, just above the enemies of the realm. There wasn’t much on their lists of “valorous deeds” that Hurreini could conceivably accomplish.

Except.

Except “the great pilgrimage.”

Hurreini’s presence here suddenly stings. It is one thing to take this voyage out of faith in The Triumphal Words. I have always envied the strength of belief required to step onto the deck of our ship, leaving behind all else. Looking at Amur’s reaction to my fanciful descriptions, however, it is all too easy to imagine a new theology monk unfurling a chart, pointing to a position on the bottom, and telling Hurreini that this trip is the only way to be worthy of a good afterlife. Was that why she reacted so negatively when I mentioned asking a monk?

I lean forward and hold both her hands in mine. “The Far Shore is, above all, a place where you fit. Where nobody makes you feel like you don’t belong.”

I can feel Amur’s gaze on us again, like a hot stovetop.

“Can I walk straightaway?” asked Hurreini. “Or do I have to wait?” She has a coughing fit which rips her hands from mine before I can answer, but she looks at me expectantly when it passes.

“Straightaway, I think.”

“Me too,” she says, and we eat our pudding, the clinking of the spoons against our bowls echoing in the empty space.

“I’m bored,” says Hurreini halfway through the journey, during our nightly pudding time. “There’s nothing to do on this boat.”

“Oh?”

“Nothing. Because I tried all the stewards’ games.” She pauses to cough. “And I’m tired of listening to the singer.” She leans forward and whispers: “His breath is stinky.”

The singer in question, Nanjan, was a last-minute replacement months ago when our usual bard quit. He is often drunk, and, frankly, not very good. Performing on ships like ours is no longer viewed as the honor it once was. I lower my voice and gesture with my spoon. “Can I tell you a secret?”

One of her eyes is bigger than the other, but they both get very wide. “Yes.”

“I get bored on this boat too.”

“What do you do?” she asks.

When I truly don’t have anything to do, I go to the observation deck to watch the waves. My doubts seem lesser there, in the presence of such vastness. The passengers may have diminished, but the sea has not, and it still moves with an unseen power. I tell Hurreini none of this, however.

“I cook something new,” I say instead. “I look around and see what I have too much of and then I toss it all together and see what happens. It might be delicious, or it might be…” I shrug.

“Yucky,” Hurreini says.

“Yes. But it’s fun either way.”

“Can I try?”

I tell her to meet me in the galley tomorrow morning after breakfast. She arrives in the arms of one of the porters, with another behind holding a chair. I indicate a spot beside the stained chopping block, and the porters set her there. For some reason, Hurreini has brought her pony cake from the first day. It is so stale it makes a clattering sound on the chopping block when she puts it down. The frosted mane and tail are spotted with mold.

“Do you want to make another pony cake?” I ask. There is no way I can let her eat this one.  

“No. She’s here to watch.” She picks up the pony cake and makes her voice deep. “I want to learn to bake horsey food.” Doing the horse voice makes her cough. The nurse onboard says to rub her back when that happens, so I do that for a few minutes until she recovers.

“What do horseys eat?” I ask, when she catches her breath.

“Um…eggs?”

Hurreini seems to constantly bypass whatever internal power I have to keep my laughter in. “Ok,” I declare. “We shall make an omelet!” I show her the larder and make a big deal about how only I and the captain have a key to it. I show her some of the things we have “too much of,” which are, incidentally, things that taste good with eggs. She takes the bait with the jar of capers and the half-wheel of hard cheddar, but then she sees a jar of frosting left over from the traditional “Halfway-There Cake” I made for the crew last night.

“That too!” she says.

The aftermath of the omelet is all over the galley when we finish what turns out to be a truly disgusting creation. Hurreini laughs when she spits it out though and pretends to feed it to her pony cake.

“See,” she says, “that’s why we don’t like it. We’re not horses.”

I make her a real omelet for dinner. I cut it into the shape of a horse head, using an olive for the eye, drapes of shredded cheese for the mane, and a light dusting of paprika for the nose.

Once the stewards have served the rest of the crew, I slump into my spot on the bench of the crew dining table and let the head steward serve me. We are two days before our scheduled arrival.

This morning, Hurreini had her last coughing fit.

She died gasping for breath while I fussed over how to make the dates and shredded coconut atop her oatmeal look like a puppy.

The silence in the room is choked; every sound stings sadly; every gaze is vacant. The captain drinks her soup from the side of the bowl and rips into her bread with savage teeth.  

“We’re lowering the bodies here,” she says through a mouthful of bread. “Hurreini and the others in the cargo hold.”

 And when I look around me, everyone is nodding. Many through tears, but nodding.

The captain must see my disbelief. “There’s no reason to go further,” she says. Her eyes are red-rimmed. A silver strand of hair has escaped her bun and plastered itself against her haggard cheek.

“We haven’t even reached the outer fog,” I say.  

“And?” asks the captain. She sloshes wine into her mouth without breaking eye contact with me.

“How do we know the current will take them to the bay so far out?” I ask.

The question hangs in the air for a moment, and then the captain carefully places her wine glass on the scarred wood of the table. “The same one who supposedly made the bay also made that child broken from birth, then…” her voice breaks, but she swallows and regains control, “…then claimed her two days before she completed her pilgrimage. Claimed her in panic and terror, I will add.”

It is only then that I realize the red sash of marque that usually slants across her yellow coat is gone, the sash that authorizes a captain to engage in service to the Far Shore. It was, at one point, the highest order of retirement from the navy. I’ve never seen her without it. In the open collar of her shirt, however, there is a crude necklace made of string, seashells, and pressed cherry blossoms. Hurreini made several of them as gifts to the crew. Mine hangs on a nail on the larder door. I never knew the captain had one. “If the creator wants,” the captain continues, “he can gather the dead from here. I’m not giving him four more days of my life.”

I look around the table in dismay. Nobody objects. Nobody is even meeting my gaze.  

I take a breath and breach the silence. “Did the Creator give us any oars?”

Hurreini’s body is wrapped in orange cloth in the bow.

I row astern.

When we reach the fog five days later, a sigh of exhaustion gusts through my cracked lips. I slide off the blanket that I had draped over my head to guard me from the sun. It slumps atop a small pile of fish bones and my empty flask.

The mist is blessedly cool to my sunburned skin. Slowly, the shadowy peaks of the bay resolve into being as the current draws us in.

“Straightaway,” I rasp, patting Hurreini’s toes through the cloth. “Straightaway.”

A strange bird swoops out of the fog to land in the water beside the boat. Its pelican-like bill is bright yellow. Its head is the same shade, yet its feathers gradually fade to saffron as they reach the end of its wingspan. It cocks its head at me when my stomach rumbles, and I am suddenly ashamed that my first thought was to wonder if I could catch and eat it.

A verse from the Triumphal Words whispers in my mind. I’ve been repeating them to myself a lot during the interminable days of rowing.  

          On this shore, life is decay,
          our days bought in blood
          from the slaughter of beasts,
          and the ripping of plants from the ground.

My mind is as hazy as the fog. We consider each other for a still moment, then it dives underwater, emerges on the other side of the boat, and flaps into the air in a spray of sparkling droplets.

My eyes are drawn back to Hurreini’s wrapped form. The once-glorious pony cake rests upon her chest. I straighten suddenly. The cake is plumper than it was a moment ago. And the mold on its surface seems to be receding.

Is it a trick of the light, filtered by the fog?

Or simply my over-tired mind?

The bird, now unseen, calls out. Its throaty caw echoes. Or is it another bird, answering?

A gust of breeze ruffles my hair.

It smells of cherry blossoms, flavored with salt.

I hold myself perfectly still and watch the cake to see if, perhaps, it will begin to rise and fall with new breath.