Mink River: A Novel by Brian Doyle Read Free Book Online Page A

established, or to be established at any time, in the future, in any way, shape, or form. Also the Department will record and advocate the recording of history, in every way, shape, and form, in all extant media and via media to be invented in the future. Also the Department, and/or its assigns, will also at all times practicable offer its services to residents, of all species, in matters having to do with public assistance and education, under any conceivable, or to be conceived, definition of public work. Questions? See the Director.
    22.
    Grace on the boat with her older brother Declan. Smoking cigarettes. Declan runs the boat and decides what to fish for: scallops sometimes, salmon sometimes, halibut sometimes. Depends.
    Why’d you crop your top? asks Declan.
    Felt like it.
    Why?
    Change.
    You look like a broom.
    Piss off.
    And why’d you cut up mom’s car?
    Felt like it.
    With my torch.
    It’s dad’s torch.
    Which means it’s mine. He’s not going to use it.
    Leave him alone.
    Why? You love him all the sudden?
    Piss off.
    The boat slides on through the twilight and as they pass the mouth of the Mink full dark drops over the ocean like a scene change in a theater. The boat rocks and slaps. Tide coming in. Their cigarette ends glow. The silence is rich. A small fast dark bird whips by the stern and Grace identifies it instantly: nighthawk.
    They’re not usually at sea, are they? she says.
    Who?
    Nighthawks.
    Feck if I know, Grace.
    Odd.
    Tonight Declan has rigged the boat for halibut and when they are far enough off the beach they set the long lines and eat sandwiches and drink coffee and wait. After a while Declan squeezes into the little cabin to read by lamplight but Grace stays in the stern, staring into the dark. Declan knows her well enough, after two decades, to leave her alone. But he watches her face for a while, with its fringe of hacked black hair.
    A woman , he thinks. Who knew. Was just a kid. Now look. Those shoulders. That fecking tattoo. Breasts. Mouth on her like a mean dog. Smart though. College smart. She’ll never go. Should have gone. She’ll marry some loser with refrigerator parts in his yard and ten mangy dogs and a huge tab at the pub. Waste. Should make her go to college. Dad should send her to college.
    There’s a joke. The old man doing something for someone else. Hell fecking freeze over.
    23.
    In the hotel the old nun thinks of Moses. She was young and strong when she found him. Lithe, pliable, supple , she thinks. She has been a teacher of reading and writing all her life and words swing and sing through her mind all the time in parades and poems. Concatenation. He had fallen from his nest in a maple tree and was huddled brokenboned groaning in the mud and leaf litter. Moaning sobbing weeping .
    She’d crouched and stared.
    A new crow is an awkward cake from the bakery of the Lord; all angles and bones, half naked still from the shell, hardly feathered at all.
    She and Moses gaped at each other, each frightened; the nun of this angry little sudden bony goblin in her path and Moses of this giant billowing creature clearly leaning in to tear him to shreds.
    It had been an unnerving day for Moses: strenuous escape from the shell, rush of smells and winds and Mother, and then lurching out of the nest and the hell-ride down through the whipping branches and slapping leaves and smashing to the ground pain pain pain and now this leering awful nightmare;
    who cradles him in the lap of her white habit and brings him first to Owen, who builds a complex latticework of splints and slings (and paints them black for symmetry, detail being everything and the core of beauty as he says), and then to her room in the old hotel, where she reads aloud to the bird for weeks, Edmund Burke mostly, and painstakingly teaches him to speak. She starts with words she thinks will fit the shape of his mouth: car, roar, raw . Then when he has a hundred words in his vocabulary she teaches him to put them together