Stern Men Read Online Free PDF

lied. “It’s fungus. It’s from the damp.”
    Mrs. Pommeroy told Ruth that she had the same fungus on her bedroom wallpaper every now and again, and that she slept just fine. She said she slept like a cozy baby every night of the year. In that case, Ruth announced, she’d sleep in Mrs. Pommeroy’s bedroom. And, in the end, that’s exactly what she did.
    Ruth slept on the floor next to Mr. and Mrs. Pommeroy’s bed. She had a large pillow and a mattress of sorts, made from rich-smelling wool blankets. When the Pommeroys made any noise, Ruth heard it, and when they had giggly sex, she heard that. When they snored through their boozy sleeping, she heard that, too. When Mr. Pommeroy got up at four o’clock every morning to check the wind and leave the house for lobster fishing, Ruth Thomas heard him moving around. She kept her eyes shut and listened to his mornings.
    Mr. Pommeroy had a terrier that followed him around everywhere, even in the kitchen at four o’clock every morning, and the dog’s nails ticked steady on the kitchen floor. Mr. Pommeroy would talk quietly to the dog while making his breakfast.
    “Go back to sleep, dog,” he’d say. “Don’t you want to go back to sleep? Don’t you want to rest up, dog?”
    Some mornings Mr. Pommeroy would say, “You following me around so you can learn how to make coffee for me, dog? You trying to learn how to make my breakfast?”
    For a while, there was a cat in the Pommeroy house, too. It was a dock cat, a huge coon-cat that had moved up to the Pommeroys’ because it hated the terrier and hated the Pommeroy boys so much that it wanted to stay near them at all times. The cat took the terrier’s eye out in a fight, and the eye socket turned into a stink and mess of infection. So Conway put the cat in a lobster crate, floated the crate on the surf, and shot at it with a gun of his father’s. After that, the terrier slept on the floor beside Ruth Thomas every night, with its mean, stinking eye.
    Ruth liked sleeping on the floor, but she had strange dreams. She dreamed that the ghost of the Pommeroys’ dead great-uncle chased her into the Pommeroys’ kitchen, where she searched for knives to stab him with but could find nothing except wire whisks and flat spatulas to defend herself. She had other dreams, where it was storming rain in the Pommeroys’ back yard, and the boys were wrestling with each other. She had to step around them with a small umbrella, covering first one boy, then another, then another, then another. All seven Pommeroy sons fought in a tangle, all around her.
    In the mornings, after Mr. Pommeroy had left the house, Ruth would fall asleep again and wake up a few hours later, when the sun was higher. She’d crawl up into bed with Mrs. Pommeroy. Mrs. Pommeroy would wake up and tickle Ruth’s neck and tell Ruth stories about all the dogs her father had owned, back when Mrs. Pommeroy was a little girl exactly like Ruth.
    “There was Beadie, Brownie, Cassie, Prince, Tally, Whippet . . .” Mrs. Pommeroy would say, and eventually Ruth learned the names of all the bygone dogs and could be quizzed on them.
    Ruth Thomas lived with the Pommeroys for three months, and then her father returned to the island without her mother. The complicated incident had been resolved. Mr. Thomas had left Ruth’s mother in a town called Concord, New Hampshire, where she would remain indefinitely. It was made pretty clear to Ruth that her mother would not be returning home at all. Ruth’s father took Ruth out of the Pommeroy house and back next door, where she was able to sleep in her own bedroom again. Ruth resumed her quiet life with her father and found that she did not much miss her mother. But she very much missed sleeping on the floor beside the bed of Mr. and Mrs. Pommeroy.
    Then Mr. Pommeroy drowned.
     
    All the men said Ira Pommeroy drowned because he fished alone and he drank on his boat. He kept jugs of rum tied to some of his trap lines, bobbing twenty