“When Papa was away at sea”

“When Papa was away at sea” is the opening line of Outside Over There, the children’s book Brian West used to read to Apollo Kagwa. The phrase recurs as Apollo discovers the worn book, recites its beginning to his infant son, and returns to its images in later scenes. Its simple account of a father’s absence is also the threshold to a story of a mother outside, a child distracted from her baby sister, and goblins who take the baby and leave an icy replacement. For Apollo, the line carries the intimacy of a remembered book alongside the unease of what its story says can happen when no one is watching.

The book and its remembered beginning

Apollo encounters the phrase in the Improbabilia box left at his front door. Among its contents, Outside Over There is one object he can begin to understand without first asking Lillian Kagwa to explain its significance. He finds no dedication or note from father to son, and no handwriting by Brian West. Instead, the physical condition of the book supplies its own history: the pages are well worn, their upper-right corners faintly smudged, and the spine cracked. This is a book that was read repeatedly, not kept for display.

Holding it, Apollo imagines Brian reading aloud to his child, perhaps on the very couch where Apollo is now sitting. He begins the first page aloud, and the words “When Papa was away at sea” give him a point of contact with a father whose absence has left questions behind. The line does not prove the imagined scene occurred; Apollo hopes to find evidence of connection in the book, but what he has is a well-used text and the possibility that his father shared it with him.

That possibility matters in a household where reading has not been a shared routine with Lillian. She works hard and, at night, often has only enough energy to sit with Apollo and watch television before falling asleep. He does not resent her for this. Once she is asleep, he takes off her shoes and wig, turns off the television, and goes to his room to read, a habit that began when he first learned to sound out words. Brian’s book lets Apollo imagine that he was not always the household’s only reader. He even wonders whether his own appetite for texts was inherited from his father, though the book cannot settle what Brian intended to share beyond it.

Recitation as fatherhood

Years later, Apollo recalls the book while caring for his own baby, Brian Kagwa. In the basement of a Riverdale home, the two-month-old works to lift his head. Apollo is so moved by this small effort, and by the development it may begin, that he has to return to work to keep from crying. The moment places the phrase’s remembered father-and-child reading beside the practical, immediate labor of caring for a baby.

As Apollo sorts through boxes of books, the first several prove worthless. He tells his son that Brian West left him a children’s book he used to read aloud, one Apollo now knows from memory. While changing the baby, he recites the opening and explains the scene it begins: Papa is far away; Mama sits beneath an arbor in a garden; inside, the young Ida has been left to care for her baby sister. Apollo pauses to explain what an arbor is, making the remembered story into an act of narration addressed to his own child. The line is no longer only something he received from a father he barely knows how to understand. He is now the parent speaking it to a baby who depends on him.

The details Apollo recounts give the opening its tension. Ida plays a horn to help her sister sleep, but looks out the window as she plays. The goblins enter while her attention is elsewhere, carry the baby away, and leave a replacement carved from ice, dressed like the missing child. Apollo’s account emphasizes that Ida is physically in the same room but is not watching the baby. The phrase about Papa’s absence thus opens a story in which the danger does not come only from a distant father: the child left behind is also exposed by a lapse in attention.

Return to the illustrations

The book resurfaces when Cal brings Apollo oatmeal and reads the opening aloud. Apollo scans the pages: Mama on a garden bench, Ida inside with the baby and her horn, and the shadowed figures in purple robes approaching the window. At the page where the goblins take the baby, he stops and pulls his hand away. Cal turns the page for him. The replacement in the crib is visually identical to the sister but made of ice, so the familiar story’s threat is made concrete in an image Apollo cannot casually pass over.

On another occasion, Apollo sets the book beside Brian Kagwa’s grave marker and makes room to read after finding stale table crackers in the pantry. The phrase begins the reading again. He stops at the illustration of Mama, a young woman in a faded red dress with a white ruffled collar, staring into the middle distance. Apollo’s question about what she is looking at remains unanswered in the supplied scene. That pause preserves an uncertainty in the image rather than resolving it: the book invites attention to Mama’s gaze but does not, at this moment, provide Apollo with an explanation.

A line detached from the book

The phrase appears once more outside Apollo’s deliberate readings. In a store, an old man who has been rebuffed after making a dinosaur snap takes his bags of Starbucks food and mutters as he walks away. Among his muttered words is “When Papa was away at sea.” Apollo has been looking over the counter for food; he notices a buzzing sensation along his jaw, scratches at his chin, and then spins around. The scene does not explain why the old man says the line or establish that he shares Apollo’s memory of the book. Its recurrence is therefore striking without being fully accounted for: words associated with Apollo’s private history emerge in the speech of a stranger.

Across these appearances, the line changes with its setting but remains tied to the same beginning. In the Improbabilia box it evokes the possibility of a father reading to his son; in the basement Apollo turns it into a story told while he tends his baby; in later encounters the book’s images make neglect and substitution harder to treat as abstract dangers. The old man’s muttered repetition carries the phrase beyond those intimate scenes, without supplying a definite explanation. The line’s force lies in that combination of familiarity and unresolved meaning: Apollo can recite it by heart, but each return asks him to look again at who is absent, who is watching, and what may be left in a child’s place.