"Jay Lake - A Mythic Fear of the Sea" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lake Jay)

There were pictures of boats.

I realized that I would sooner go live in the woods and eat squirrels than climb
to GranddaddyтАЩs ear again. But a boat. That was something else.

Maybe the sea wasnтАЩt so big up close. Maybe that had been an illusion.

I spent the autumn building model boats to sail on forest streams and
nameless ponds, filching adult tools when I could.

I would build me a boat, I resolved, and cross over my fear. I would show
them all.

***

By the following summer I was living in a lint cave near GranddaddyтАЩs Waist.
Daddy hadnтАЩt spoken to me in months, though Mom brought me tea bags and
home-baked bead from time to time. When I went into town, I was a ghost. Miss
Kermand smiled sometimes, and Boordma twins squalled and pointed, but no one
else met my eye, touched me. People just stepped aside when I walked toward them.

Granddaddy had started rumbling during the winter.

Was it my refusal to pray? What had disturbed the old man? The sooner the
town was rid of me, the happier everyone would be, including himself.

But I had a keel, tucked in a trouser fold somewhat kneeward of the waist.
Close enough to the water for me to lower my boat off the seaward cliffs, but far
enough that I didnтАЩt have to look. The swishing of wind and tideтАФI had learned that
word, тАЬtide,тАЭ from the libraryтАФwas bad enough. The reek of iodine and salt was
worse. I would not look at that silvered horizon.

тАЬHorizon,тАЭ another word our town had never needed to teach me.

My keel had ribs, and planks were curing over slow fires hidden several places
in the forests that lined the intersection of pants and earth.

***

The sail was the hardest part. That next autumn I went to see Mom.

GranddaddyтАЩs rumbling had become a sort of wheezing roar by then, a distant
storm that never quite passed on out of hearing.

When I entered town, I was stared at. Glared at. Hands cupped over mouths
as secrets were whispered. Children I had known followed me with sticks.

She waited on the porch of my familyтАЩs house. Daddy was nowhere to be
seen.