Sea of Tranquility by Lesley Choyce

Author:Lesley Choyce
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000
Publisher: Dundurn Press Limited
Published: 2003-04-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

No. She could not live on the mainland. She envisioned the town. Mutton Hill Harbour. And the hospital there. She had not thought about the hospital for a long time. She had not thought about the baby.

Kyle Bauer’s father had drowned at sea in a fishing accident, as had his older brother,Taggert. Kyle himself had put in two years working on long liners out of Lunenberg before he found himself one day on the Grand Banks in the middle of his first truly vicious storm. A November hurricane, the last of the season; the first that year, however, to make it this far north.

Kyle came within six inches of going over the rail when one of his shipmates reached out a hand and grabbed the back of his rain gear as he started to go over the side. Kyle fell back onto deck, locked onto something solid, and hung on, barely able to pull oxygen into his lungs, the air was so full of sea water. He lay like that, shivering and crying, until the captain steered the ship out of the worst of the storm, and they had to pry what was left of the young Bauer kid off the deck plates. Whoever had saved his life had gone overboard. Three men in all had fallen prey to the hunger of the sea: Kessel, Hennigar, and Johnson. Kyle thought it was Hennigar who had saved him but he could never be sure, so he prayed for all three and spoke highly of all of them to anyone who would listen. Hennigar was a heavy drinker who kept a knife in his pants and would use it on anyone who he felt deserved it; Kessel was quiet and moody and never had any time for anyone; Johnson was a bully who always liked to pick on the weaker men on the Good Fortune. One of the bastards had saved his life.

It was 1942, a bad year for the planet, when Kyle Bauer left the sea for good and took up farming. But instead of moving down to his family’s old acreage in New Germany, Kyle was lured to Ragged Island, where cabbage was king.

He held fast to the railing as he sailed out on the ferry, on a clear day in June, to see what there was to see on Ragged Island. An island at sea seemed an unlikely place to have a sauerkraut plant, but there it was — a big old warehouse by the government wharf where island women shredded cabbage heads with knives that looked like sickles and dumped the cabbage into brine solutions. There was a growing mainland market for island sauerkraut. It had a reputation as being the best sauerkraut in North America. It was served in fancy Halifax restaurants. It was shipped by the truckload across Canada and down into the Boston States. Better still, Ragged Island Sauerkraut had landed a massive contract to supply the armed forces. Canadian soldiers would go into

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