Of Sea and Cloud by Jon Keller Read Free Book Online Page A

if finally agreeing with his own thoughts. His father was gone and he was here and to hell with Osmond. If he let Osmond fish his territory then he may as well not fish at all. He knew what Bill would do if he was here. He would cut every damned buoy that was not his own because nobody would fuck with Bill. But Bill was not here and neither was Nicolas. It was just Jonah and he spat and grabbed his knife from the bulkhead and he said out loud, Come on and get me, Osmond.
    He worked his way down the string. He hauled each trap and cut the nylon heads open so the traps would not continue to fish. Then he cut each buoy off and tossed the mess overboard and he watched as lobsters and traps and ropes together disappeared to the deep. He’d never before done such a thing to another fisherman but never before had another fisherman tried to fish his ground. Of course he’d heard stories over and over again about trap wars with fishermen carrying rifles and shotguns aboard their boats and the sounds of gunfire echoing over the sea and this right here was how those wars started but whether Jonah was ready for that to come down or not he did not know.
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    An hour later he gaffed the first of his father’s yellow buoys. He turned it in his hands like a quarterback would a football. The buoy was clean but the paint was slightly faded by sunlight and seawater and bleach. He tried not to think about Osmond so instead he thought of his brother but that didn’t last long. He could have warned Osmond. He could have taken some time and settled the fuck down and maybe tied a knot in Osmond’s ropes or cut out a few trap heads like a normal fisherman and thereby given Osmond a chance to move the traps.
    But not him. Not Jonah Graves.
    Jesus Christ, he said out loud. I did it now.
    He’d destroyed nearly five thousand dollars’ worth of gear and that didn’t include Osmond’s time or the catch Osmond wouldn’t have. He tried to silence his mind and its fear as he worked his way around the Leviathan and he kept muttering, Fuck Osmond but that did little to reassure him. He stacked his father’s traps aboard his boat and he told himself that his father would have done exactly what he’d just done but the more he thought about it the less certain he was and the more certain he became that he’d just started something he could not finish.
    When he had a load of traps aboard he steamed north toward home and he kept saying fuck, fuck, fuck and he couldn’t see any land except a single mountaintop which rose sprawling in the western sky as if to hold sway over the seawater and he wished something so powerful would hold sway over him.
    Virgil and Bill in their bigger boats caught up with Jonah as he neared the coastline. Each boat was stacked high with Nicolas’s traps and flocks of sea ducks like firecrackers burst from the water and flew before the boats. Together with the birds the three boats steamed into the harbor like a funeral procession with Bill in the lead and Virgil at the tail and the three men were silent on their radios as each thought his own thoughts about Nicolas and about the ocean which was different than it had ever been before.

When the boats were unloaded they trailered Nicolas’s traps to the pound and parked in the small field that backed up to the marsh. A twisting section of tidal stream ran through the middle of the brown grass and beyond it stretched a thick patch of alder. The light faded and the sea lay flat calm in the twilight. A band of eiders bobbed in the surf and far offshore the clouds and sea fell to a deep blue and disappeared.
    The pound was a three-acre body of water shaped like a horseshoe. At its head stood a causeway which at one time had been only a gravel bar but now held tons of blast rock that Nicolas had hauled from the upriver quarry. The causeway led to a small island called Burnt and causeway and island together formed