The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover by Bob Shacochis

Author:Bob Shacochis
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780802119827
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
Published: 2013-09-03T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The morning seemed to contain an implicit lassitude, without energy or desire, but even the fuse of her enthusiasm failed to ignite her father’s spirit. Come on! Dottie encouraged him, singing Madonna lyrics into an invisible microphone, dancing on the bow with campy provocation to no avail, her vitality diffused into an inert atmosphere. The seabirds themselves refused to fly.

Listless, her father cleaned himself and his soiled bunk, had a spartan breakfast of coffee and bread, then held hands with Dottie as they prayed silently together to God, Saint Christopher, and Saint Nicholas for safe passage and with particular attention to Stella Maris, the Star of the Sea, and he recited out loud the Sub Tuum Praesidium—We flee to your protection, O Holy Mother of God.

The spread of the sky was yellowed and creased like old parchment, the sun blotted into an edgeless ochre smear. She had never before heard about the lodos, a southwest wind fabled for its virulence, born out of the Sea of Marmara in the last months of summer and known to gather in its gust-blown skirts plum-colored clusters of malignant squalls. Her father knew of the lodos and its fearsome reputation among sailors, yet motored south out of the cove anyway, the mainsail hauled optimistically into an eerie humid calm. Once past the island he had given her a compass heading and retired, spending the morning belowdecks, inhaling naswar, opiated Afghani snuff, to ease the assault of his double-barreled malady, an uncharacteristic bout of depression added to the dysenteric churn in his gut. Later in the morning the wind strengthened and shifted head-on and when she sensed the change in weather she called for him, then shouted out for help, but he did not come.

The seas began to stand up higher than she would have thought possible, and then out of the swells a thick dark monster with a sudsy crest butted against the bow, washing the deck with warm blue water, and she could feel the boat buck and shudder and pause beneath her feet, a slow second’s sensation of backwardness before gravity returned and the vessel dived into the trough, a motion that seemed to catapult her father into the cockpit, grabbing her shoulders to steady himself.

All right, he said, ordering his daughter to keep the boat pointed straight into the wind. Then she watched his off-balance performance as he slackened the mainsheet from its cleat to reef the sail, scrambling ape-like on all fours beneath the furious dragon wing of slapping fabric, tying square knots down the length of the boom, and then told her, as if he were suggesting something mildly interesting, to try falling off twenty degrees to port and he let the boom scythe out and, once secured, the Sea Nymph heeled over confidently into angry water, rocketing at a diagonal through the bludgeoning waves.

The breeze has picked up, hasn’t it, he said, the assertion, like his expression, a bit daft and lordly, standing with her, shin-deep in the cockpit, water boiling through the scuppers.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.