Landfall

By Francis Rosa

Orignally Published in print in Volume 13 of Kelp Journal- July, 2025

Vitus gazed toward the water and suddenly he was a kid. The streets were clay dirt, and everyone gathered by the crackle of a radio on hot evenings for fun because no one in the Sicilian hillsides owned a computer yet, though they all imagined the box, with its bumble of noise and chroma-sleek cascade of links and code, like watching a waterfall dream. There was a big parade then with flags and confetti.

Now, in what felt like another lifetime, he stood in a fishery, running fingers over the wooden crucifix in his pocket, knowing what he was doing was crazy. The windows opened to the warmth of a tropical breeze drumming in from the bay. The green murk of the Corpus Christi coastline sent shivers through Father Vitus, even among the wads of Texas heat.

He dressed in a black cassock robe, pulling on the thin rim of his collar for more air, trying not to sweat and mostly failing as he waited for a response from the fishery owner. Vitus had the sudden urge to run, lock himself in his car, drive up the Coastal Bend, get lost in tall grass marshes and the scatter of clammy beaches, wander around until God or the waves found him. His face drained into a pale wax the more he stared at fish trophies mounted to the walls; glossy scales and unblinking eyes like checker pieces. Soon his head felt hollow, vanished in the relentless sweep of hurricanes. Two men spoke rapid Spanish in the corner. An older grizzled man guided his grandson to a span of seashells and dried starfish in a glass case. The boy stared wide-eyed at the priest instead.

The owner, a tanned burly man with wild hair, just gave a blank stare, same checker piece kinds of eyes. Vitus fidgeted with his cross again and repeated his request.

“I’d like to rent a boat, just for the evening, you see? A skiff is all really.”

The owner wasn’t answering him. A young employee mopping the fish-gut floor behind the register glanced up and down, curious, as if waiting for a sermon, or a lunch break perhaps. Vitus drew cash out of his duffel bag, a small stack of tens.

“I have the money, I’d like to leave soon, now if possible.”

The owner crossed his arms against the counter where portraits of snapper, sharks, and redfish were fading next to an advertisement for the Texas State Aquarium.

He spit something dark into the trash. “Not dressed like that you ain’t.”

“I'm sorry?”

The owner sighed. “You’re goin’ to get the bay, and salt, and fish innards, all over your—” He stopped as if chewing the gunk of words in his mouth, then spoke more carefully, “Over your costume, and whatnot, we don’t clean the skiffs often. But that ain’t what bothers me, the real kicker’s y’all’s shoes.”

“My shoes?”

“All polished, leather, flat bottomed. You stand up and you’ll slip, hit your head.” The owner crashed a huge palm against his own skull. “Bam! You see? The bay has no use for them. Accident waitin’ to happen.”

“P-please,” Vitus stuttered. “It’s for clergy work.”

“Clergy work, huh? What, you got some oil rig to go baptize?”

“Well actually I was hoping to do a blessing”

“A blessing?”

“I was going to bless the bay.” Vitus heard his voice outside of himself, shriveling with nerves. This was the first time expressing the idea outside closed stuffy church rooms with organ music and fragile murals beaming in light. Now with the smell of fish flakes and the bustle of Corpus right there, it felt unreal, something you would think up one star-bloomed midnight before you fell asleep, to never recall again.

“I was going to convert the whole bay into holy water with a prayer actually.”

Vitus didn’t know what to expect, but the owner just grunted and stared doubtfully out to the murky bay, the rock piles, the string of sand lining Mustang Island, and its winding jetties separating Corpus from the blue expanse of the Gulf. The grandfather was no longer explaining about urchins to his grandson. The two in the corner had stopped chatting in Spanish and peered over to the register.

The owner sighed again. “Well is the church in all its wisdom providin’ you with a boatin’ license? Have you been on a skiff before yourself? You don’t need a license for the small ones, but it's awful useful.”

“Please, I drove over from Rockport, I would’ve gone to Aransas Pass, but the ferry sometimes has waits this time of year.”

“What a hunk of metal, it’s a good thing I ain’t paying taxes for it.” The owner spit again.

“Yes,” Vitus said, unsure what he was agreeing to.

“You come from Rockport huh?” The steel in his voice had softened a little. He had taken Vitus’s money and was counting. “How are y’all up there, folks hangin’ in?”

“Best they can.”

“That Harvey was a real fucker, got two cousins that lost their whole roof, walls all flooded, still don’t got their kitchen back. It’s a shame. I’m blessin' y’all.”

“Well thanks,” Vitus said awkwardly.

“They’re saying there’s gonna be another Harvey this year in the Coastal Bend. Everyone’s predictin’ all kinds of trouble with the hurricane season comin’ in.”

The priest's chest tightened, and he thought of galloping winds, the way water had filled his nostrils until he coughed up the Gulf, how the sky had darkened in a swirling eclipse, how he’d come from Sicily, entered a strange spastic land, gone to college, gotten drunk with new friends, built a life for himself on the Great Plains, found a girl, lost her to an extravagant city with cooler men, traveled west like every great American should at least once, felt the country course through him, how it all had flashed before his eyes in gusts one stormy night on the coast of Texas, how he shouldn't be alive. “Let’s hope not,” Vitus replied.

The owner finished counting. “Listen, we got quite a port here in Corpus. Oil tankers, these are big vessels. You start rovin’ around, those boats will steamroll you right over. You ever watched a steamroller?” Before Vitus could answer, the owner had moved on.

“I want you to look out there.” The owner held up his index finger and pointed to where the USS Lexington was permanently docked, a big military gray battleship crawling with tourists, appearing from a distance like a plastic toy in a Cajun bathtub. Beyond it was the Harbor Bridge, concrete steel rebar, this humped sea creature arching over the bay, a highway tail curling toward the Lexington, a serpentine head snaking into the Corpus cityscape. Looming above all this was another steel frame where men worked at incredible heights like ants on a branch.

“That’s the bridge,” he said slowly, like he was talking to the child and not a priest. “That contraption bein’ constructed right above it, that’s gonna be the new Harbor Bridge. It’s even taller ’cause some of the oil tankers are so fat they can’t make it under the first one. We got big boats around here, not foolin’ around. So, if you’re a small boat you better know where you’re off to.”

Vitus nodded, feeling foolish.

The boy behind the counter stopped mopping and eyed Vitus. As green as Vitus was to the priesthood, he recognized that look. Something intense in the pupils. It was the look of someone who felt guilty, who no doubt had something festering inside that they wished to eject from their nerves, like plucking at a toothache. But the boy was biding his time, unsure in the harsh presence of Catholicism. Vitus was not in the mood for any confessions right then but tried to shake thoughts like that from his head because he was no longer just a hesitant deacon and was supposed to be a total servant of God now.

It occurred to him he was being asked a question.

“What kind of bait you got in the bucket?”

Vitus looked at the owner, then down to the bucket at his side, “Oh, that’s not bait, it's sea salt.”

“You're bringing sea salt out to the bay?”

“It's part of the ceremony for holy water,” Vitus said, defensive, overwhelmed with disgust at himself for having come.

The owner waved him off shrugging. “Your business is your business, was just askin’.” He instructed Vitus to wait as he went to a back office to fetch the life vest and paperwork.

Vitus took a metal seat by the window. The sunlight was hot against the glass, and in his silhouette of black cloth, he felt he was going to burn. People were staring. Everything seemed too bright; it always seemed too bright now. He thought of how the clouds had turned things gray, how wind had scurried away the sunlight, and how rain pooled across town, clawing at homes. Whole neighborhoods thrown around like rag dolls. And now there was this peaceful thing in front of Vitus, lapping waters, the stillness of Port Aransas in the distance, sloping dunes like silk ribbons, the reassuring caw of gulls. It all felt misplaced.

He stood to leave, realizing this was dumb, but the boy with his mop approached and cleared his throat so that Vitus had no choice but to look away from the screen door.

“Father?”

“Yes?” He tried to answer in his most holy confessional kind of voice. It felt phony and came out like he was a disturbed passenger on a bus.

“So, I got a question.”

Vitus waited while the kid tried to pull something heavy out of his soul.

“So, I work here. Have for the past two summers; it's basic work, but I get my pay and good breaks, and I have a tuna melt on Fridays. Is that bad?”

Vitus frowned. “Is what bad?”

“Eating fish on Fridays, ain’t that a sin and whatnot?”

Vitus shook his head and tried to put on a fake smile. He felt odd and tired like his faith had been diminished to some bad pun. “You’re supposed to eat fish on Fridays.”

“What if I don’t, are y’all okay with that?”

“Well, it’s not up to me, it depends on matters of belief and…” He saw the dull look on the boy’s face. “Just eat whatever you want.”

#

In Sicily there was confetti and papier-mâché figurines of Santo Bartoli, this large priest with curly hair, a bellowing voice, and a face like a Roman senator. He wasn't a real saint, but that didn’t matter to the cooled clay homes or to his neighbors who inhabited them. The real Santo Bartoli moved toward Vitus through the crowd, shaking hands that reached out in waves, allowing the procession to cram around the halo of light he exuded. Vitus’s father was shouting and whistling, waving arms like a madman. Bartoli was so close Vitus was tempted to stretch his small fingers out and touch the light. When he moved to do so, Santo Bartoli was already looking him dead in the eye, turning the pinwheel that was his life. In that moment Vitus felt perfectly frozen, crystalized like a boy in amber. It was a witchcraft of the pupils, these sharp brown bulbs that spiritually electrocuted him.

#

Now it was all a bad, bad pun.

Vitus knew he had to get out of there, fast. His feet were already moving for the exit. Just then, the screen door swung open. In walked aviator sunglasses, shorts, a Hawaiian flower shirt, and a wide grin. An old man appeared, leathery and stiff, slow as if the world was caught unfurling in front of him. Vitus stumbled backward and rubbed the panic from his eyes. It was the head of his parish, Father Cabrera.

Cabrera ignored Vitus and turned to the owner. “How’s it go?”

The owner grinned. “It's damn good.”

“And Bev?”

“Oh, she's doin’ fine, can’t complain, though Lord knows she finds her ways.” They both laughed like old friends. “One of these nights you need to come over for crawdad. She uses secret spices. Sometimes I trap the mudbugs myself.”

Cabrera smiled and agreed, grabbing oars off a wall mount as if they’d been waiting for him, then motioning to Vitus. “This one’s with me.”

“Well, good,” the owner said. “The poor fella looks like he’d paddle himself into the nearest shoal.”

Vitus nodded along, trying to be fine with the good-natured humor, with how Cabrera had miraculously appeared out of the humid salty air, dressed like a member aboard a cruise ship. He was pulled outside, where everything smelled like low tide on clam-flats, seaweed, and packed mud.

He spilled out an apology, “I’m sorry, I've decided it was a bad idea. Was calling it off anyway.”

Cabrera ignored him, yanking out a set of beach clothes from a bag, swearing under his breath in Spanish, “Go put these on in the porta-potty.”

Vitus obeyed and burst out in shorts, tennis shoes, and a T-shirt, looking like any summer tourist. He adjusted the shirt endlessly, feeling stripped without the new robes.

“How did you know I was here?”

“The Lord,” Cabrera joked. “You’ve been talking about something like this all week. I stopped by earlier; you told the deacons you were headed to perform an emergency baptism. I may be old and slow as dirt, but I know a fib when I hear one.”

He untied a skiff and picked up the oars. “Now get in.”

“We’re still going?”

As an answer, Vitus was shoved in with the buckets and bags. There was a terrible churning in his stomach, and the swift movements of the bay underneath were like the shuffles of a stalking predator.

Vitus turned longingly toward his car. “Are you pissed?”

Cabrera murmured Spanish to make Vitus feel out of place and pushed off from the shore.

“What was your plan?” Cabrera asked, plunging the oars into the water. He interrogated immediately, with sharp wrath, “Parade around the bay in robes and put on a show for the gulls; do a little trick, like this is some kind of circus we’re running? If we declare in all your piety that the bay is filled with holy water, will that bless the ships? Will the word of God spread to the pelicans as they swoop out in flocks proclaiming the Lord our Savior? What, you hoping holy water spills out to the islands, intertwines with the coast until the divinity becomes inseparable from the seawater, like some oil spill in reverse? Holy water evaporating, condensating heavenly bursts of cumulus clouds all to push away the horrid storms of your past, as if this were some personal exorcism to ward off category five demons of the Gulf? You expect to rain down a grand aspersion on the entire Coastal Bend? You want to play saint and baptize Texas anew?”

Vitus had no answer. Cabrera’s sweeping tumult of words, like a biblical passage, had caught him off guard, and the water below had left him queasy.

Father Cabrera hissed. “The sacraments, they aren't some magic trick for you to pull out of your newly pressed sleeves. The crucifix isn't some wand for you to wave around, say a few hocus-pocus prayers, and blammo!” He gestured with wrinkled palms. “Natural disasters cease. Perhaps you should try walking on water too, do a little tap dance to end poverty.”

Cabrera swatted him away with bony fingers like Vitus was a pestilent fly, turning so he could properly row. His old muscles sagged in the hot sun. They rowed out far, and Vitus looked into the unforgiving water, missing Sicily.

#

Santo Bartoli had electrocuted Vitus, and his father had gone dead quiet as Santo Bartoli, larger than life, handed his Vitus a smooth glass case of holy water, flashed a grin, moved on. It was over in seconds. Vitus watched his father’s posture change, like a flower in new soil. Even then Vitus understood the significance. His father worked in vineyards, toiling under a cocoon of Mediterranean heat for a scrap of wages. He was a poor farmer and would never be or do anything else. It was as though he had finally been given one story to tell, a thing he could brag about and puff his chest up for.

#

“Why can’t it be those things?”

Cabrera’s face went red. “What?”

“Why can’t miracles be a sort of magic? Holy water, what is it there for? For purification, a cleansing of the soul from sin. It’s renewal, moral resurrection even. A way to restart in dark times, and yes, a way to ward off real demons and evil when it arrives.”

Cabrera rowed unconvinced. “That day in the storm must have done a number on you.”

“Look around,” Vitus replied. “Year after year, storm after storm, battering into the region. The people build up, and it just keeps coming and coming. They need a fresh start, to be cleansed of these hurricanes, the fright, the debris, cracked walls, and moldy homes. Is it really so much to expect a change in their troubles? We use it for the holy Eucharist of the sick. Would anyone deny that people are sick? Sick and tired? Sick with anxiety? Sick with hope?”

Cabrera shook his head in disappointment. “You’re like the man with the hammer; he thinks every problem is a nail. You think you can end natural disasters with prayer and divine hand-wringing. Holy water isn’t something we do lightly. There is a process.”

Vitus knew the logical sublime steps. His father had once loved to describe this process, regaling himself in a steep Sicilian voice, like a bad bedtime story. Place salt in a bowl. Consecrate and sanctify the salt. Place water in a bowl. Exorcise the water. Add the purified salt in, forming the sign of the cross as you do. Bless it all, perhaps during the Novus Ordo. It was all theater. Medieval cinema.

#

It was something he could brag about. It was everything. The whole way home Vitus’s father sped with one hand on the wheel, the other squeezing the little glass vial as tightly as he could, as if an angel might slip his grasp. At home, he set up a bureau. Vitus’s mother was a small, shriveled Catholic woman who did nothing but clutch rosary beads and yell in strict tones at him and his brothers. She would secretly cry when her husband stole flowers from the withered yard and pillaged her small collection of glittering jewels to place as ornaments in front of the shrine of holy water instead. Vitus’s father talked about the holy water day and night to any guest who would listen. “It's protecting our whole house,” he’d say in mantra. “We’ve got a special covenant with God, our own family omen.”

Vitus wondered, if that was the case, why God couldn’t get them more food, or a better home, or banish the backbreaking work in the field that would surely kill his father. He didn’t voice any of this but instead reached for a dirt cloth as his father shouted to wipe down the bureau and keep the vial polished. Vitus understood then with a certain ease that he hated the church and the whole lot of them.

#

Cabrera interrupted his thoughts. “People, they treat God like a fad. Soon we’ll be selling holy water in plastic bottles. Non-believers will be drinking it for holistic health like a smoothie. I remember during the Covidian era the facemasks and lockdowns. I traveled to a church up north. They kept holy water at the door in a motion-sensing dispenser that you activated before entering. Like we were Pontius Pilate, like it was hand soap for our soul and our whole diocese was some big grimy sink. It was blasphemous”—Cabrera’s hands tightened on the oars as he talked—“No one understands the significance of this stuff. It lacks credibility.”

The word credibility set off a bell in Vitus’s head. He laughed by surprise, the way one might slip on loose gravel. He was absolutely tearing up and had to calm his breath before speaking to Cabrera whose eyes had gone to sparks and brimstone, whose knuckles had turned white and bony, still gripping oars.

“That's what you’re worried about?” Vitus’s laugh got louder. “This whole time? Our credibility? Have you read the papers? Have you seen the coverage on CNN?”

Cabrera frowned and waved his hand away. “I don’t watch trash.”

“The house is on fire, and you’re inside worried about how you look covered in smoke.”

He stopped laughing. A long time passed in tight silence with the skiff gliding along while Father Cabrera sat perfectly still as if meditating now. A large vessel tore in from the Gulf, leaving a colossal tail of foam behind. It would soon be on them. Vitus could tell he’d said too much, punctured a void that was best left alone. He grabbed the oars, feeling with their ends the slick, spooky world hovering below.

Vitus spoke as he rowed, trying to dissolve new tension in the air, “My father was a stubborn Sicilian bastard. He owned a special vial of holy water and kept it like an idol on our bureau. One day my brother and I were horsing around. One of us, I still don’t know which, bumped into the bureau. There was a wobble that lasted a second and felt like a year, and the whole thing fell. Glass shards skating across the floor, the water seeping into the boards like spilled milk. We covered our tracks, biked down the road, found a salt-shaker with the same look, turned on the faucet. He never found out, but something was off. We could all feel it. Bad juju. Six months later he caught the cancer and died. It was hard on us all.”

Cabrera looked up stunned. “That wasn’t your fault.”

“I know it wasn’t. Of course, we both knew that, but it makes for a nice story and it's poetic somehow.”

The sun slid into the west. Far away, kids were laughing on a beach, a bell was going off, a flock of gulls were cawing at the shoreline. If they didn't move soon, the boat in the distance would crush them for sure.

“You remind me of myself at your age,” Cabrera said. “I used to drift out to Mustang Island at night. It was so still and peaceful, even with the crashing waves. And I could make out pickups wheeling across dunes, the tide inching towards their headlights. The sky would be so dark and clear, and if I looked to the Gulf, I would see a whole band of lights blinking on and off in crazed harmony. It would make me think of the wise men who saw that bright twinkle in the desert, though I knew those lights were just the raw bulbs of oil rigs and barges. The surf and foam make for quite the cathedral. Every person should spend a night alone on the waves.” Cabrera paused, squinting into the sun, right at the impenetrable blueness and hot sands, saying this all as if to convince himself, then spoke softer, “But you have to remember it isn’t really a cathedral. It's just waves is all.”

Vitus imagined a young Father Cabrera casting about in the night with the lap of seawater and the swish of petroleum lights, but then thought of black waves and slipping under.

“The hurricanes,” Vitus said. “I don’t know how to watch people suffer like that, year after year, I don’t know how to watch this unfold. I don’t have the guts for it. And yet they come to me now. They ask me to pray. They ask me why God lets these things happen. What am I to do, go into a detailed description of climate change policy, tell them about greenhouse gases, to recycle more, that God works in mysterious ways?''

“You are there to give them faith, not ray of sunshine promises,” Cabrera said, shrugging his shoulders.

“How do you talk to people whose faith is still struggling to leave the eye of a hurricane? Faith didn’t even bring me here. God didn’t give me some rapturous moment of inspiration leading me to the water’s edge. It was my own doing, my own depression, I think.”

A massive ship of steel churned the water around them. Vitus was surprised by the velocity of his own dread. Father Cabrera took the oars and, with a light touch, led them out of danger, as simple as snapping his fingers. The glimmer of tall buildings and thread of Corpus traffic reflected off the surface before being torn asunder in the wake. Cabrera stared at the bucket of salt in the center.

“When you were a deacon strutting around the church, spitting out those firecracker sermons with a Sicilian twang, I used to think to myself: Watch out for him”—Cabrera pointed—“he’s the crazy one.” He turned back toward the shore, pulled up the oars. “But now I realize I was wrong. You’re the sad one.” There was a pause. “So, what's your real confession?”

Vitus took a long breath, cracked, and then it just poured out of him.

“New as I am, I thought I’d heard it all. I sit in that box of shame with them, and they always ask for the same kinds of things: They want me to pray for hope, or forgiveness, or kindness, or health, or healing, or mercy. But last week a man came and sat totally silent for ten whole minutes. Then he confessed in a sudden fury, asking for grief. I was caught so off guard, I nearly forgot to absolve the man. Before he left, I asked him why on earth would he pray for grief. He explained it to me, real simple. He said he woke up, switched on the TV, and all it talked about was disease, unarmed killings, political scandals, and corruption. Opened his phone to more of the same, people being squashed like ants, earthquakes, drone strikes, bombings, and children dying for no reason at all. He finished breakfast, thought it all through, and realized he didn’t feel a thing, couldn’t put a word to a shred of it. He was totally sapped. It just seemed like the same terrors on a screen for a new day. It didn’t feel like the end or Revelations; it just felt like Sunday. He couldn’t even feel badly anymore, and that was such a scary thought. That he wasn’t the only one. That there’s coming a day when no one feels badly about all this anymore. ‘That's why I need you to pray for grief,’ he said. Well, I prayed with him and it nearly broke my heart.”

“I heard the radio this morning,” Vitus continued, “and felt ice down my spine. I don’t want to sit on the sidelines anymore. Those pews are like benches sometimes. Like we are committed to watching some violent contact sport, cheering for our patrons to just hang on. We say it's going to work out and be all right, and we don’t know a goddamned thing about being all right. Not a thing.”

Vitus realized how much talking he’d done, how his voice had risen, how he was nearly standing up in the skiff making it sway. He turned away toward the shoreline, embarrassed. “We should paddle in now.”

Father Cabrera shook his head, bending toward the side of the skiff as if inspecting the water, searching for invisible patterns in the seafoam. He dipped fingers in, murmured a prayer, grabbed salt, and blessed it, slowly dumping the salt out of the bucket and into the bay, forming the sign of the cross, which dissolved into brine on impact. He was reciting in that low raspy voice, “Blessed are you, Lord, all-powerful God, who in Christ, the living water of salvation, blessed and transformed us…”

Vitus felt a sort of pebble form in the pit of his stomach that might have passed for something like real grief, but he couldn’t be sure.

Cabrera finished, and lowered weathered palms. “I suppose I seem like a hypocrite, and if so, fine.”

They rowed away from the murk, where the big cross of salt was still dissolving.

“It's not going to stop the hurricanes,” Vitus said.

Cabrera didn’t reply until they were nearly at the pier. “Even with all your salt buckets, theatrics, and that brooding cloak, you still forgot something when you came out here. Without faith, holy water might as well be a bucket of warm spit.”

Vitus thought about diving into the cooled water, letting salt sting and open his eyes in the sublime way they once had one dark, gusty evening. But the urge passed, and he was left staring at the horizon, where everything stretched into long shadows. The sky melted into blankets of purple and sleeping pink. He imagined a figure lurking beyond all that calm, a storm that would hover in slow forlorn cycles across flat Texas marsh one day soon and rain down more worry upon the land. He said a prayer, mostly for himself and the tears that wouldn’t come, and the skiff moved on.