Cave-in by Joseph Monninger

Author:Joseph Monninger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2014-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

Bertie Smith had his hands in a sink of dishwater when his heart began to give way. It didn’t go all at once, but staggered him sufficiently that he was able to take two steps to his kitchen table and swing his hindquarter around and sit in his usual chair. His chest rocked him with pain. A tiny electric bolt in his head wondered if he wasn’t suffering something life-threatening, but his instinctual determination, earned through sixty-seven years of lobstering and roaming the bays beyond Portland, had left him with a hard, staunch character. He didn’t believe in illness.

But it came anyway and he put his head down on the kitchen table, his forearm sticking to one of the plastic place mats his daughter had brought last Christmas during her annual visit from Indiana. The place mats had pictures of lobster boats and lobster pots, and Bertie, with his head down next to the empty potato bowl and the dribbles of gravy he hadn’t yet cleaned up, found it almost funny that he should feel such a pain in his chest while his eyes stayed riveted to the lobster boat picture. A nice-looking boat, he admitted. Its name wasn’t visible from the camera angle, but he had seen a boat like that once, from up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and he recalled admiring it. So that’s what he felt when the final tremor took him.

He did think of the kids out on the island, but what good was that? he wondered. He knew in his final moments that he wasn’t going to be the one to fetch them. That was someone else’s job now, and he wished there was something he could do or say to make it better, or to inform someone, but he couldn’t even open his mouth to begin. They might have to put in a few days extra but someone would eventually get them. He wanted to tell Barney, a man he’d known since boyhood, a fellow with a boat who could have picked them up dandy, but it was too late for that. The wall phone looked to be a thousand miles away and the lobster boat on the place mat had begun to carry him out to pull his last pots.

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