Chapter 8
“HEAVE!”
The four of us—Granddad Angus, Warren, Dulsie, and me—leaned, hauled, muckled, bore down, and came a daisy onto about a million and a half pounds of dory and clothesline-pole caber after Warren had finished fishing the mooring rope up out of the water.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to just rent a tow truck?” I asked.
“Keep pulling,” Granddad Angus ordered.
“We could have hired a helicopter,” I suggested, “or taken a fishing boat out and towed the dory in.”
“Where would be the fun in that?” Granddad Angus asked.
“Heave!” Warren shouted again.
I heaved. The rope quivered, shook, and burned in the palms of my hands like a two-hundred-foot-long electric eel. I wondered if there would be time to go home and get five or six pairs of work gloves from the basement and put them on, slowly, one at a time, while I watched everybody but me heave up that one-and-a-half-million-pound dory.
“Heave!”
I squeezed my eyes closed.
I was certain I would have a heart attack any minute now and puke my guts out and my head would explode. Then, when I opened my eyes the rope had grown two more pairs of hands as a couple of onlookers grabbed hold. The dory grew a little lighter.
“Heave!” Warren and Granddad Angus said together.
So I heaved, and as I heaved I kept my eyes on the waves beating against the rocks. I wondered how long those waves had washed this bit of shoreline. It felt good watching those waves splash the stones. They never changed. They just kept washing ashore, always reaching and never quite making it. There really isn’t a place in town you can stand without hearing waves on rock.
If the waves didn’t change maybe nothing else really needed to change. Maybe I wouldn’t have to go to Ottawa. Maybe I could stay in Deeper Harbour.
It was something to hang on to while I heaved.
I can do this.
If I can drag a dory and a caber out of the harbour then maybe, just maybe, I can make a sea monster.
The rope grew a few more pairs of hands.
The dory was flying through the water like a speedboat.
We heaved it ashore, hauled it into the boat shed, and set it on a pair of sawhorses that looked old enough to have stood in Noah’s very first ark-building shop. After that, all of the people who’d helped us wandered down to the tavern to talk over the amazing feat they’d accomplished—namely, hauling up our dory.
That’s how a town works, I guess.
“So when do we build the sea monster?” I asked.
“One step at a time,” Granddad Angus said. “First, I figure you and Dulsie should go and get started on patching up Molly’s pumpkin patch.”
“But I want to help,” I said.
“First the pumpkin patch,” Granddad Angus said.
I might have known.
That’s how grown-ups work. Every time they are building something interesting and you want to help they send you off for a screwdriver, and by the time you get back with the screwdriver the whole thing is done.
“Why does Dulsie have to help?” Warren asked.
Apparently, Warren still didn’t know that Dulsie had been part of our midnight caber toss, which was good. Warren seemed okay with the idea of us smashing his dory, but I wasn’t sure how he’d feel if he found out that Dulsie was involved. Parents can be awfully peculiar when it comes to their kids.
“Getting these kids out of the way will give us time to figure out a plan,” Granddad Angus said.
“I’m not going anywhere near that old bat Molly,” Dulsie said. “She can kiss my ripe, rosy, Maritime—”
“DULSIE!” Warren yelled, cutting her off just in time.
She turned, giggled just a little, and then ran in the other direction.
I guess I was on my own.
I plodded off to go dig my own grave in Molly’s garden.