Sea of Tranquility by Lesley Choyce Read Free Book Online

good. He had a clean handkerchief that his mother had ironed. He had just had a shower and didn’t reek of cod or lobster. He had to sit down because he had just gotten a cramp in the calf of his right leg. The fog looked like it wanted to lift (but never did fulfill the promise). And the ferry would not return that day due to a bad batch of diesel fuel pumped on at the dock in Mutton Hill Harbour that afternoon by Hennigar’s Marine Fuel Service Limited. The rest would be marital island history.
    Noah and Moses would argue often about Viddy’s tardiness, but never in front of her, and, despite this small canker of family strife, it was a good and happy marriage. Whenever she was ashore, Viddy would drive their mainland automobile to all the Frenchy’s used clothes stores up and down the South Shore and buy umpteen hats. Whenever she returned from the mainland on such a day, everyone on the ferry boats knew what was in all those boxes and bags. Moses built many closets. A hat was never thrown away by Viddy. But he didn’t mind. She was a wonderful woman and gave him twins — Clay and Dawn. When Viddy went hat hunting on the mainland, their good neighbour Sylvie would mind the kids and tell them stories of the island in the old days. When Sylvie would babysit for a day, all the clocks were turned towards the wall and the household schedule went to hell. Neither Moses nor Viddy cared, and once Sylvie was gone, they would not turn the clocks back to face them for well over twenty-four hours.
    Moses was generally healthy, and his only real affliction was the predilection of his body to cramp up in the legs. This was a result somehow of having become soaking wet the time he hauledyoung Whittle out of Scummer’s Pond. His father made him carry a cramp knot in his pocket to ward off the problem. A cramp knot was an actual knot from a tree, a cat spruce in this case. It was an old German folklore thing and it didn’t work, but he carried it anyway to make his father happy.
    â€œIt doesn’t work because you don’t believe in it. We used to believe in everything when we was young, but not no more,” his father said.
    â€œI try to believe in it, I really do,” Moses said. And he carried it with him everywhere, even to bed to dispel the damn leg cramps, because Moses would get a leg cramp attack any time, any place. Hauling up lobster pots ten miles at sea or making love to his good wife Viddy late on Friday night after a chowder dinner and several pints of dark, homemade German beer. The cramps would always come, reminding him of the irony of saving Calvin Whittle who killed those poor women.
    Moses was always one step ahead of the fishery, it seemed. Already moving into herring roe or silver hake, red fish, ground-fish, swordfish, or sea urchins when absolutely necessary, and, when it seemed that the whole fishery along Newfoundland and Nova Scotia was ready to go belly up for good, Moses anchored his boat on the edge of the channel at the Trough and he pondered the future. When the whales appeared like long-lost German cousins, he talked to them and, although they didn’t exactly talk back, they convinced him they were the future of the island, perhaps his only hope.
    Moses knew that if he was going to stay on his island and remain prosperous, if he wanted Dawn and Clay to grow up with a roof over their heads and a chance to go to Dalhousie University or the Sorbonne or even just business or beautician school in Halifax, he had to time this thing right.
    Whale-watching, it turned out, was already taking off in California,Alaska, Baja, Maine, and Maui. As his left leg began to cramp up and he rubbed a thumb on his shiny cramp knot, he phoned the tourist bureau in Halifax and then a travel agency in New York and told them about his whale-watching cruises that were going to begin in the summer of 1993. In two years, while all the other fishermen were grovelling for government