NaGeira Read Online Free Page B

strangers or neighbours smite you, no dank ague infect you. When death lies all around you, the leaves and boughs protect you.
    Why do the people of this place always settle by the coast? Are they too foolish to turn around and see what’s behind them? The forest is warmer and carries fewer dangers. And life abounds here. Mushrooms grow in a single night, moths and flies appearand attract birds which can feed us. In a few months there will be berries too, and nature will bask in plenty. But the planters here have forgotten how to live on the land, if they ever knew. They have come here on the sea to fish upon the sea. Once settled, they look out to the ocean and turn their backs on nature’s stores.
    One day they will make maps of this place as they do in England and Ireland. The settlements will show like spiders couching along the ragged coastline while the interior remains a naked, unexplored blank. When I am ill and ready to die, I shall go down to the water where I have no protection. The forest cannot harm me, this I know too well. It eases every sorrow and soothes every pain. When I have had enough of it all, I will turn my back on this protection. I will expose myself to the wretched, heaving ocean. I will let its waves enfold me and pull me to its icy heart. People here have it wrong. The ocean is for the dying, not for the living.
    The ocean robbed me of my family when I was still in my prime. My husband, Gilbert, and two fine children, Katherine and John, slain before my eyes, the beach rocks lapping their precious blood. I’ve hated beach rocks ever since. I can see the sun’s glint in their greedy, wet eyes after the tide pulls away.
    My younger two, Mark and Mary, were captured by the pirates. I remember how Mary’s infant fingers clawed the air as she was carried away. The rogues’ ship sailed to the rim of the world while I collapsed on the beach, staring and helpless, the tug in my chest growing stronger and stronger. Katherine’s newborn baby, Matthew—my first and only grandchild—disappeared. I did not see the infant taken and searched for him for days—inthe forest, along the empty beach, under the woodpile—calling a name his young ears would not even recognize as his own. Matthew was my last hope. I had seen him neither slain nor taken. If I could find his helpless form still living, I thought, it would redeem every sorrow I had ever felt. I could teach him about his parents, his grandfather, his uncles, and aunts. It would bring comfort to an ocean of pain and turn ashes to love.
    But the pirates had been thorough. Even our fishing boats were set adrift, and for malice, not for gain. Days later one returned in pieces to the cove, its fire-scorched boards bobbing against the tide. I recognized the debris as the remains of our boat from a piece of charred cloth tied to an oar fastening.
    Everyone was dead or taken away. When at last I gave up on Matthew, I wandered our settlement alone. I buried the lifeless, fly-blown bodies and wept over them. For days I stayed alone. Shadows danced over my shoulder, then disappeared as I turned to greet them. Footsteps scrunched through the shingle and voices called in the breaking waves. I ate in misery, feeling solitude like icy fingers about my neck. Then, as autumn turned to winter, I realized I must leave this strange purgatory. Like a fury emerging from its daze and for the first time noticing the hell that surrounds it, I became suddenly frantic, scambling over rocks, brush, and hill until I arrived, bleeding and delirious, to this cove. John Rose, Simon’s father, helped me build a cabin away from the sea and half-removed from the settlement. Rose was a Bible man with tired eyes, hollow cheeks, and a haunted look about his sloping shoulders. He seemed much older than his forty years. With quiet acceptance, he provided for me as he could, leaving food and firewood by my door. We seldom spokeand I was never invited into his home. Whenever I saw him