The Waterman: A Novel of the Chesapeake Bay Read Online Free
Author: Tim Junkin
Tags: Fiction, General, Suspense, Historical, Action & Adventure, Men's Adventure
against the eaves. She tried to get him talking, but he had grown silent. She went to the sideboard after a while and started the other side of the Patsy Cline record. âI Fall to Piecesâ was the first song. She came over and took his dish towel from him and dried his hands, and then she dropped the towel on the floor and put his hands around her waist and pressed herself against him, laying her forehead against his neck, and started swaying in his arms to the song. He felt the heat from her body, her breasts soft against him through her thin cotton shirt, and her lips brushing his neck.
âKate,â he whispered into her ear.
She put her finger up to his lips to quiet him. âI just want to help. If I can. Like this,â she said. âJust hold me now and allow me to hold you for a time. Letâs let it be some comfort. To each of us. Enough.â
He thought he understood. With his mind. With his sense of the order of things. And so he danced with her there, alone, and held her as the dusk descended, and he accepted this just as she offered it, as some comfort, as enough. But none of this thinking, nor the numbing rush of the alcohol, nor other knowledge he possessed,could diminish what it was she made him feel and had always caused him to feel, more poignant for the separation, for a heart already rent and open from grief, holding her there, that lightning flash in his blood, Kate clinging equally to him, each with the other, song after song, as the shadows drew upon them. Walking with her toward the water, toward Matty and Byron, the horizon a darkening bruise of purple, his mind whirled in intoxications of confusion, of grief and loss, of new purpose, of longing and regret.
2
He slept fitfully that night on the back room couch, his dreams haunted by successive images: of Pappy, of his mother Sarah, of Kate, all merging in incongruous circumstances. Rising early, he helped his two friends repack their car to leave for the airport. Kate got out of the MG and came back to hug him one last time. Standing on the porch landing, he watched them drive down the dusty lane.
In the kitchen he fixed a pot of coffee and he poured himself a cup and sat at the table. He got up and took a plate of leftover ham out of the refrigerator. There were cold biscuits on the stove, and he made himself a ham biscuit to eat with his coffee. The house was still, but he could hear the murmur of the breeze as it came up off the Bay. After he had eaten, he stuffed a few more biscuits with ham and wrapped them in tinfoil and filled a thermos with the coffee. He put on his fatherâs old oilskin coat, which he had been using, and put the biscuits in one of the pockets. The heater in his car didnât work, so he had to keep the window down to defrost the windshield as he drove past Easton to St. Michaels Road, over the Oak Creek Bridge to Pecks Point.
He found his fatherâs workboat riding high in her slip. The key to the ignition was where his father had always kept it, under the rear port floorboard on a small hook. He had to turn it over a bit, with full choke, but within minutes he had her started and had cast off the lines and was heading down the Tred Avon toward the mouth of the Choptank, which opened to the Bay.
He ran the north shore of the river that he knew and had always known, through the mouth of Plaindealing Creek and past the ferry dock at Bellevue, around Cooperâs Shoal, past Bachelor Point to the south and the Benoni Point lighthouse and into the wider Choptank, where you could see out into the Bay, the horizon an undulation of whitecaps. It was along the north shore of the Choptank, off the mouth of Broad Creek, that his fatherâs dredger had been discovered, foundering in a drift on the neap tide, well after a storm, her skipper washed away. He traversed the drift line once again, scouring the steel-like surface of the shoreline, and then went on.
The wind out of the northwest had
âKate,â he whispered into her ear.
She put her finger up to his lips to quiet him. âI just want to help. If I can. Like this,â she said. âJust hold me now and allow me to hold you for a time. Letâs let it be some comfort. To each of us. Enough.â
He thought he understood. With his mind. With his sense of the order of things. And so he danced with her there, alone, and held her as the dusk descended, and he accepted this just as she offered it, as some comfort, as enough. But none of this thinking, nor the numbing rush of the alcohol, nor other knowledge he possessed,could diminish what it was she made him feel and had always caused him to feel, more poignant for the separation, for a heart already rent and open from grief, holding her there, that lightning flash in his blood, Kate clinging equally to him, each with the other, song after song, as the shadows drew upon them. Walking with her toward the water, toward Matty and Byron, the horizon a darkening bruise of purple, his mind whirled in intoxications of confusion, of grief and loss, of new purpose, of longing and regret.
2
He slept fitfully that night on the back room couch, his dreams haunted by successive images: of Pappy, of his mother Sarah, of Kate, all merging in incongruous circumstances. Rising early, he helped his two friends repack their car to leave for the airport. Kate got out of the MG and came back to hug him one last time. Standing on the porch landing, he watched them drive down the dusty lane.
In the kitchen he fixed a pot of coffee and he poured himself a cup and sat at the table. He got up and took a plate of leftover ham out of the refrigerator. There were cold biscuits on the stove, and he made himself a ham biscuit to eat with his coffee. The house was still, but he could hear the murmur of the breeze as it came up off the Bay. After he had eaten, he stuffed a few more biscuits with ham and wrapped them in tinfoil and filled a thermos with the coffee. He put on his fatherâs old oilskin coat, which he had been using, and put the biscuits in one of the pockets. The heater in his car didnât work, so he had to keep the window down to defrost the windshield as he drove past Easton to St. Michaels Road, over the Oak Creek Bridge to Pecks Point.
He found his fatherâs workboat riding high in her slip. The key to the ignition was where his father had always kept it, under the rear port floorboard on a small hook. He had to turn it over a bit, with full choke, but within minutes he had her started and had cast off the lines and was heading down the Tred Avon toward the mouth of the Choptank, which opened to the Bay.
He ran the north shore of the river that he knew and had always known, through the mouth of Plaindealing Creek and past the ferry dock at Bellevue, around Cooperâs Shoal, past Bachelor Point to the south and the Benoni Point lighthouse and into the wider Choptank, where you could see out into the Bay, the horizon an undulation of whitecaps. It was along the north shore of the Choptank, off the mouth of Broad Creek, that his fatherâs dredger had been discovered, foundering in a drift on the neap tide, well after a storm, her skipper washed away. He traversed the drift line once again, scouring the steel-like surface of the shoreline, and then went on.
The wind out of the northwest had
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