Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
1
The flashlight was square, waterproof, and a bright fluorescent orange. Square, so it could sit firmly on the seat of a flounder boat, waterproof so it would float if it went over the side, Day-Glo orange so it could be easily spotted and fished out of the shallows when (not if) it did go overboard with a gill net or crab pot.
I set it atop the water tank in the small windowless pump house and held Carl’s handwritten instructions up to its strong beam.
Check.
Check.
Check.
The only jugs I could see in the shadowy recess beside the pump were some yellow ones with antifreeze labels. I had to move three wire crab baskets to get at them and—
“Need some help with that?” asked a voice from the doorway behind me.
I jumped, banged my head on a pipe that ran from the ancient pump to a fairly new water tank, and turned to see an adolescent male shape in black rubber boots.
It’d been two years since I last stepped foot on Harkers Island and he’d shot up four or five inches, but there was no mistaking that sun-bleached straw thatch. Nor the ubiquitous rubber boots he wore whenever he wasn’t barefooted or heading off to school in sneakers.
“Thanks, Guthrie,” I said, “but I believe I can figure it out myself.”
The boy elbowed aside Carl’s charcoal grill and pushed in beside me. “I help Carl all the time.”
The most distinctive feature of “Down East” speech is that every long
Some say that “hoi toider” (high tider) speech is a survival of pure Elizabethan; others say it’s a natural product of two hundred years’ isolation here near the southern end of the Outer Banks. Until a causeway and bridge were built in the forties, boats were all that connected Harkers Island to the mainland.
One of Guthrie’s great-grandmothers died in a hospital over in Morehead in the mid-seventies, and that dash across North River, through Beaufort, across the Newport River channel, was the first time she’d ever been off- island in her entire eighty-some years, never mind upstate. (Her children always swore it was the shock of leaving the island that killed her, not the stroke.)
The smell of salt air and fried fish clung to Guthrie’s white tee shirt as he hoisted a yellow jug from my hand.
“This what you’re using to prime her with?” he asked.
“If it’s clean water.” I stepped back so he could get at the pump. Hey, I’m not proud. Any male, young or old, who wants to do my dirty work, he’s more than welcome.
Water gurgled from the jug till it ran out through the open pump valve.
I still had my cousin’s instructions in my hand. “Did you close the gate valve?”
“Yep.”
I fished out the plug end of the pump cord, he pushed it into the socket, and the pump came on with a roar.
Guthrie started to back out.
“Wait! We’re not done.” I almost had to shout to be heard above the noisy pump as I read aloud from the crumpled sheet:
“Which’un’s the hot water valve?” the boy shouted back.
