Read Online August Gale by Barbara Walsh - Free Book Online Page A

love, and now he has shattered her heart.
    She was so pure, so trusting, my Nana. I can understand her wanting to believe Ambrose’s words. Wanting to mend her broken family. Wanting a father for her sons.
    Billy is four, too young to understand his father’s absences. But Ronnie, at thirteen, is just a few years shy of becoming a man himself, of figuring out the world and his place in it. I imagine my father’s fury that begins brewing in San Francisco, like a storm gathering strength from the wind and waves. The resentment and pain welling up inside him, the questions that bubble up: Why did my father leave us? Why did he do this? The confounding and tormenting lessons that his role model, his hero, offered.
    I cannot fathom the strength of my father’s emotions, the power of his feelings. I only understand the wrath I feel for a man I’ve never met—and those emotions offer me a modest appreciation of how deep my father’s feelings must run.
    Lost in our own thoughts on this April evening, my father and I are silent, each reliving the past. The refrigerator hums once again, lulling us both in the still house. I glance at the clock that hangs on the wall behind me, surprised to see that it is a few minutes after 1:00 a.m. My movements pull my father back to the present, and he glances at the clock too. He sighs and pushes his chair from the table. “Guess we should go to bed, Barbsie,” he tells me, harkening back to my childhood nickname.
    I nod and stand myself, reaching up to hug him goodnight. “I love you, Dad.”
    He softly replies, “I love you, too,” before turning down the darkened hallway.

CHAPTER 7
GATHERING A CREW—MARYSTOWN, AUGUST 1935
    T he salt cascaded from the fish tub like winter snow. Granules skittered across the merchant’s wharf, turning the wooden boards white as the schooner crew unloaded their catch from the hold.
    Two fishermen grunted as they pulled lines, hoisting a fish tub from the vessel to the dock. Hooked by its iron bail, the large container swung precariously in the air, catching the schooner captain’s eye. “Careful with that tub!” the skipper hollered, waving his cap. “Ye spill that fish, I’ll split yur head!”
    The captain’s threats drew laughter from the dorymen who repaired their flat-bottomed boats along the wooden pier. “Aye,” one veteran fisherman muttered, “The old man sounds like he could do with a drop of rum after his month out on the Banks.”
    The dorymen nodded and turned back to their task, scouring every inch of their vessels. They searched the fifteen-foot dories from stem to stern, looking for leaks or cracks between the planks; they checked the lines, straps, tholepins, and buoys, ensuring their boats were seaworthy and prepared for waves that could sink or flip the small dory in the frigid Atlantic Ocean.
    A soft breeze swirled around the men as they worked, carrying the ever-present odor of fish that enveloped the village from spring to fall. It rose up from the schooner holds, where layer upon layer of salted fish awaited the market scales; from the cod livers fermenting in nearby puncheons; and from the shore rocks, where discarded entrails enticed seabirds that darted and pitched, fighting over the blood-red remains.
    Oblivious to the pungent odors that hung in the warm summer air, captains and cooks stood on schooners alongside the wharf, bellowing orders to their crews as they hauled food supplies onto decks. Barrels of salted pork and flour rolled like thunder toward the fo’c’sle, sacks of peas and sugar, jugs of molasses, and bags of beans passed from one pair of thick hands to another down the stores’ hatch.
    Across the bay, a dory edged toward the pier. The ferry master pulled his oars, his strokes even and strong, as he transported his passenger from the south to the north side of Marys-town. The passenger’s broad shoulders