Crow's Landing by Brad Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

Peterborough, built in the Ontario town of the name, which meant that someone probably had crossed Lake Ontario with it at some point. The boat had a hole the size of a man’s head in the bow, and the ribs inside were rotted, although the cedar planking itself was intact. There was a twenty-horse Johnson outboard hanging loosely on the transom. Virgil walked over for a closer look.
    â€œI bought that for my son,” Woodbine said. “Him and a couple of his dunderhead pals ran it up on some rocks in Lake Katrine one night, knocked that hole in the bow. They said it was high winds that did it, but I always figured it was too many Miller High Lifes and too few brains. We towed it home the next day and it’s been sitting here ever since.”
    Virgil did another turn around the boat. There was some writing beneath the grime on the transom and he wiped the dust away to read it.
    POP’S CAMP
CROW’S LANDING, N.Y.
    â€œWhat will you take for it?” Virgil asked.
    â€œWhy would you want it?”
    Virgil shrugged. “My grandfather had pretty much the same boat. Had a cottage up in Quebec. I could use a winter project.”
    â€œMake me an offer.”
    â€œA hundred dollars?”
    â€œI’ll take fifty.”
    â€œYou’re a hard man to do business with, Montgomery Woodbine,” Virgil said.
    They went into the house, where the old man rummaged through a pine hutch and found the original bill of sale for the baler, and the service records for it—when it had been greased, what parts had been replaced, and all the rest. Virgil paid the man in cash and towed the baler away that day. Later in the week he returned, pumped up the tires on the trailer, and took the boat home.
    He spent the winter restoring the cedar strip. Once his corn was harvested and the fall plowing was done, the workload relinquished somewhat heading into December. The cattle and calves still required feeding morning and night, and the ever-fluctuating herd of rescued horses needed the same. And there was always firewood to cut. Still, Virgil knew he would have some time on his hands in the winter, which was why he bought the boat.
    It had been years since the garage beside the house had seen a vehicle inside and Virgil had converted it into a workshop of sorts. He installed a woodstove in the corner and gathered all the tools from the four corners of the farm—chisels, saws, wood bits, drills, planes—as well as a Beaver table saw that had somehow ended up in the milk house at some point in the past. He bought cedar planking to fix the hole in the boat’s hull from a man on the Irish Line who made birdhouses, and white oak for the ribs from a horse farmer who’d purchased a couple thousand board feet of the stuff for fencing before deciding to go with the electric ribbon now favored by equestrian types, or at least equestrian types with the money to afford it.
    Virgil milled the oak down to half-inch strips on the tablesaw, rounding the edges with a router. He built a steamer out of a steel drum and a couple lengths of aluminum downspout and slid the new oaken ribs inside, stoking the woodstove until the lengths were as pliant as licorice. Then one by one he clamped them into place in the boat and fastened them with cinched copper nails. He repaired the hole in the hull with the new cedar.
    When the repairs were done, he sanded and buffed and smoothed the cedar and applied four coats of spar varnish. He pulled the pistons from the old Johnson motor and installed new rings and rod bearings. He rebuilt the carburetor and polished the magneto and changed the plugs and when he put everything back together the motor started on the third pull.
    He finished the restoration in late March and on the first warm day in April he towed it to the river, stopping at the place called Brownie’s at Kimball’s Point. Virgil launched the boat, fired the motor, and idled out into the bay. He spent some