• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 485 0

of Red Head Cove and Spread Eagle had brought the crew safe ashore and ransacked the galley and cabins and most of the provisions in the hold by the time the Devines sailed down the shore with Az and Obediah Trim. The Trims stayed with the bully boat after setting the Devines aboard to collect whatever scraps remained. The hold was a deathtrap by then, already half filled with water. Lazarus and Jude picked through the remains in the galley while Patrick went off to see if anything had been overlooked elsewhere. The ship was tilted hard to starboard and Patrick spidered along the passageways with one foot on the floor and the other on the wall. The vessel rocked forward suddenly, pitching him face-first through a doorway and he fell into a pool of novels and books of poetry, tomes on botany and science and history, philosophy and religion, bound copies of Punch. Dozens tossed onto the floor by the storm and hundreds more behind the wooden barriers meant to keep them on the shelves.

Only Ann Hope and the Reverend Dodge had more books to their names than Patrick Devine. He was always searching for strays on the shore or in Labrador and he bartered away tools and clothes and food and alcohol to take home any book he encountered. Lazarus more than once threatened to blind him to keep their materials safe from his bizarre obsession. But the wrecked library Patrick had fallen into was unlike anything he’d ever imagined. Worlds within the world and he sat there a moment, trying to take it in. Just the smell of leather and binding glue made him dizzy.

The vessel shifted again, a tremor through the length of her, and Patrick pushed himself to his feet, slipping off his coat to lay it on the floor, stacking books side by side and tying them up by the sleeves. He crawled back to the passage and made his way toward open air, the vessel heeling on the shoals as he went. When he reached the rail off the breezeway he hailed Obediah and Az Trim and they eased near enough for him to throw down his jacket of books. On the way back he passed Laz and Jude pushing a green leather chesterfield toward the stern. —Give us a hand for jesussake, Patrick shouted, stripping out of his gansey as he went. He had tied up the neck and was already stuffing the woolen sack with books when his father appeared in the doorway. Judah’s fish eyes agog as he took in the foreign sight.

—Come on then, Patrick said, this is all going under the once.

Patrick went at the job pell-mell, desperate to pack up as much as possible, and Judah took off his own sweater to mimic his son. But he seemed only to wander aimlessly among the shelves, tucking away one random book at a time. The vessel let go, slipping three or four degrees more to starboard before bringing up, and his father’s retarded puttering was making Patrick furious. —You jesus idiot, he shouted, but Judah carried on as if he was picking the ripest fruit from a tree, all the time with the same terrified expression on his face. Once he’d stuffed his own, Patrick filled Judah’s sweater in the same blind panic, shouting at the man to hurry. The two of them went back along the passageway then, dragging their improvised sacks behind them. All hands were off the wreck by the time they came out into the open, Lazarus with the chesterfield lashed across the bow of the bully boat. The Trims eased in over the starboard side of the stern which had slipped underwater and Patrick slid the books down to them from where he and Jude held to the aft rail. Judah made a jump for it then, grabbing hands to be hauled aboard the boat, and the men were waving for Patrick to follow after. But he turned back to the library, scuttling along with a grip on the rail, the decks awash below him. He sloshed along the passageway as it filled with water, hauling his shirt over his head. Patrick clung to the shelves as he grabbed at the spines and stuffed the books into the sleeves of his shirt, the sea sucking through the doorway and rising around the room behind him. The vessel let go a long groaning sigh then as its weight hauled free