Read Online Sylvanus Now by Donna Morrissey - Free Book Online Page B

the sun any more.” She crouched beneath a piece of railing, squeezing through a narrow opening of missing pickets. “Anyway, not everybody’s giving it up— most keeps their gardens back there.” She indicated a stand of pine back the way they had come, at the farthest end of the outport. He shot a glance over his shoulder, then back at the overgrown soil beneath his feet.
    “Glad to know they’re not all thinking foolish,” he said, hopping the fence. “Cripes, up and down like a dog’s stomach, fishing is. Always good to have a cellar full of spuds.”
    “Haven’t you heard of Unemployment cheques in Cooney Arm?” she asked with a tiresome look. “No more need for gardening and hunting and birding. If the plant’s not operating, everybody’s on Unemployment. I’m surprised you’re not all in your boats, rowing up and signing on at the plant. Not that far-fetched,” she said, annoyed at his unlikely look. “They’re moving about everywhere else on the island—resettlement and everything.”
    “Resettlement.” He snorted. “Might be all right for some.”
    Her annoyance grew as he paused, tossing a critical look back over the bleak-faced outport of Ragged Rock, for it was as its name suggested, a ragged point of land jutting out to sea, its fifty or sixty houses clutching at whatever stony bits of soil was afforded them. Those houses farthest out on the diminishing point appeared to be wedged into rock, some balanced on shores ten feet high, their pathways a muddied black streak that scribbled across the rock face like lengths of cable mooring them to their neighbours’ doorways, the scattered garments on their clotheslines flapping like wind-shredded sails.
    Her eyes fastened onto his profile as he scanned the outport, arrested by a shifting of his features; yet nothing had moved—the brow, she thought, it was the brow—he’d relaxed it; such a black thing it was, hooding his eyes and rendering the rest of his features dark, sullen-like. And his mouth stiffened with intent; yet his lips so thick and finely sculpted she felt they might tremble ought he to relax them as well.
    “And on the seventh day God rested,” he said, pulling a smile that registered anything but satisfaction over what he saw. “Yeah, nice place,” he added, as she kept her stare, saying nothing.
    “You don’t think He should’ve took another day? Thrown in a few more trees? Some gardens, perhaps?” she asked.
    “Well, He must’ve thought it was a job well done, else He wouldn’t have rested.”
    “If that’s how you read the words, I suppose.”
    “What words?”
    “The ones you just spoke—on the seventh day, God rested.”
    “Oh. Well, how do you read them, then?” he asked.
    She hesitated, the burden of explanation too much, then quickly said, “It’s not God that rested, but those who rest in him. Like when we says ‘the joy of a home.’ It’s not the house we means, but those in the house— Oh, never mind,” she said carelessly to his blank look. Brushing past him, she ran lightly past the fish store and out on the quay. “Which boat’s yours?”
    “The grey one with the yellow engine house,” he said, catching up. “Why do you think those words—about God resting—mean something other than what they are?”
    “Because the Bible’s wrote like that. Anyway, it don’t matter. That’s a nice grey.”
    “Yeah, well, I got it figured the Lamb of God isn’t a bloody sheep,” he replied irritably, “but you’re onto something altogether different here, with this ‘resting’ business.”
    “It’s how the saints reads it.”
    “What saints?”
    “Who cares what saints! All the saints. Would you rather just walk and forget the ride?”
    With lightning speed, he shifted tones. “Nay, nice day on the water. Come on, I helps you down.”
    Prompted by the urging in his eyes, and feeling too far committed now to back down, she allowed him to help her into his boat. Within minutes he had