Read Online The Season of Open Water by Dawn Tripp - Free Book Online

I can’t do a thing right today. No use at all.”
    He smiles at her gently, shaking his head. He won’t ask what’s on her mind or try to coax it out of her.
    â€œSome days are like that,” he says simply. “I’m having that same kind of day myself.”
    She manages a smile. She pushes her hair from her face with the back of her sleeve.
    â€œThat’s all it is,” he says. “Just that kind of day. And that piece of wood in your hand is just a piece of wood. So go to the loft and get another and cut it again.”
    She nods and carries the plank out of the shop. He hears the thud as she leans it against the sidewall in the sun.
    He looks again at the panbone on his lap—the bare sketch he has drawn so far, the whale and a small boat beside her, flung up against a wave. He tilts it toward the window to see the lines more clearly, to see what he has done and what is left to do.
    Money is reason enough to take the work, he tells himself. It is a good reason, a solid reason. Money for the children. He could set aside a little pile for Bridge.
    He knows better.
    When Noel sailed on the
Sarah Mar,
his work was as ship’s carpenter. But from time to time, the first mate would send him aloft. Noel had a gift for seeing. It was his mother’s gift. He could stay for hours aloft, his body strapped to the crow’s nest. He could mark a blow on the horizon when another sailor would see nothing but an empty, light-wrecked sea. At times, he could see a thing before it came.
    The thought of taking the work makes him uneasy—the money itself makes him uneasy. It’s not the lawlessness that bothers him. It’s the prospect of tangling with a man like Honey Lyons. It’s the deep grating sense he feels in his gut that if he takes this job, things might not turn out so fine in the end.
    Bridge comes back in with a new board. He glances up.
    â€œWhat?” she says.
    He shakes his head.
    â€œYou still thinking about that fox, Papa?” She laughs.
    â€œGuess I still am.”
    She looks at him a moment longer, then takes the new plank to the corner and picks up the ripsaw.
    Luce comes home at half past four from the icehouse, with a blade of tall grass between his front teeth and news of how Frank Mac-Donald got shot up last night at sea by a 75.
    â€œOn his way in, and they got him. Took his boat and all its stuff. A hundred and fifty cases at least, I heard. And Frank got two slugs, one in each side of him.”
    â€œIs he dead?” Bridge asks.
    â€œHe’s not, but Ruth Mason’s terrier is. Got run over by a dump truck. Dog was flatter than piss on a platter.” Luce’s boots are covered with mud and soiled straw. He stamps them out on the porch and leaves them behind the garbage pail. In the kitchen, he peels off his socks, the heels full of darning. He puts them on the floor by the stove to dry, then sits back in the chair. His skin is dark from long hours outside, hair thick and black. He pushes his hands through it. Bridge has shucked out the clams, and she is chipping onions into the pot of boiling water, potatoes and meal.
    â€œYou up for tag?” he asks her.
    â€œI’m busy.”
    He glances up, a sly cool look in his eye. “That’s never stopped me before.” And he chases her out the door, down the porch into the yard. He catches her halfway across the grass to the shop, and they tumble to the ground, laughing, underneath Cora’s wash pinned to the line. The white sheets flap like heavy sailcloth in the breeze.
    In the doorway of the shop, Noel takes a smoke. He watches them as they wrestle through the grass, and it is how they always are with one another—they shriek and growl and box and buck and fight until they are worn through and done. Then they fall quiet and lie close, with the linens drifting loose around them. They whisper together, hatching their schemes. He knows what they do. He finds the