Excerpt from Graveyard of the Atlantic

From "The Snake Hunters"

Aaron looked out over Pamlico Sound, an automatic benediction. When he was a young child, and Grandpa and Shaw were still going for mullet, he played on that water's edge while they repaired their nets. Time seemed to pass easily then, his grandfather and uncle filling that time with habits honed from years of trial and argument. Grandpa gave directions, told tales, asked for lemonade or hard candy from the house. Shaw said little, but he didn't have to say much -- the close-motion way he worked spoke for itself. Neither of them could be separated from the island or their history on it. All we got out here is what we teach our hands, Grandpa would say, eyeing the gray muscle of current that clenched at his skiff, what's tight in these heads.

Aaron slipped Shaw's old hammer into his belt, then stacked the scraps of two-by-six under his arm. Mrs. Austin's dock was as good as new. He'd earned his ten dollars. As he started down the breakwater toward Grandpa's place on the other side of the point, Slag, Mrs. Austin's black Lab, limped along the broken stone ledge behind him. Years of fetching ducks in cold water had ruined the dog's hips. It was common knowledge that dogs went down fast on Ocracoke Island, just like the buildings and engines and TV antennas set out to sway in the rough salt air.

He paused on the tide-eaten slope of the point to shoo Slag back home. He could see the weathered face of Grandpa's house too well from there, the sunburnt fringe of weeds, the empty boat slips. He did what he had time for -- mowed the front yard and kept the windows boarded, set a few mousetraps. The skiff, which belonged to him now, was tied up at his friend Shorty's. His mother had sold the other boats after Grandpa's last visit to the cancer doctor in Morehead City.

When he got to the boathouse, he dumped the wood near a sloppy pile of roofing shingles. The boathouse was still organized according to Shaw's rules of practical chaos. The neat racks of fishing rods and oiled reels were the only shrines to logic in the place; everything else was crammed into oyster crates or coffee cans. He'd never even bothered to close the top of Shaw's mammoth red toolbox, leaving it open after the accident because that's the way Shaw always left it, a habit that made Grandpa growl. Pulling the hammer from his belt, he dropped it onto the chunky scatter of sockets and screwdrivers. He would always wish his uncle had been more like his old self when he took that final trip into the Gulf Stream, able to burn cigarette holes in the overdue bills, a rebel in the smallest, most ornery ways. Instead, Shaw had reckoned himself a last-ditch gambler and went on to lose everything in one black ocean game.

Copyright © 2000 by Alyson Hagy. All rights reserved.