The Cove Read Online Free PDF Page B

moment.
    Willow branches brushed him awake, the boat’s stern shoaled on the bank. The branches were damp with dew, the stars paling and the moon already gone. He rowed back into the current with quick slapping strokes. The river curved and he passed under another bridge, in the distance the flicker of lights. Silhouettes emerged on the shore—outlines of trees, bulky squares of buildings and houses. He passed a brick edifice with an electric light illuminating the words MARSHALL COAL COMPANY . The water’s purling music dimmed amid the crow of a rooster, the cough of an automobile engine. Dawnlight unshackled high branches from the dark.
    Walter scanned the bank for a white bedsheet semaphoring a clothesline, saw one, and beached the boat. Mostly children’s clothes dangled from the wooden pins, but he found a man’s cotton shirt and pair of corduroy pants. Just as he finished changing, a dog began barking inside the house. Lights came on and a face appeared in the window. If Walter could have spoken, he would have offered to pay for the clothes, but because that was not possible, he scrambled down to the water, was adrift before a man wielding a shotgun appeared on the bank. Gray smoke blossomed from the gun barrel. Walter ducked and a hail of pellets landed in the boat’s wake. The river curved and he lost sight of the man, for good he thought, but the river straightened. An iron railroad trestle appeared and the man with the shotgun was on it. Walter veered the boat toward the far bank as another downpour of lead hit close by.
    He beached the boat and grabbed his haversack, but the bank was nothing but a slant of slick mud. By the time he’d climbed it, the man was thrashing through the undergrowth. A hefty piece of driftwood lay on the bank and Walter picked it up, hit the man flush in the chest when he emerged. The man staggered leftward and slid down the bank and into the river. There was a narrow river trail, but Walter picked up the haversack and plunged through a tangle of briars before making his way across a ridge.
    All day he wandered without once hearing or seeing anything human. Rain fell that afternoon and fog rolled over the ground like cold smoke. The trees thickened and the woods became as forlorn as those in a sinister fairy tale, a place where the guards claimed lions and bears and wolves roamed. All manner of poisonous serpents and plants thrived here and no step was safe. Immense watery caverns lay just beneath seemingly firm ground. They could give way and a man fall a hundred feet and then into water so utterly dark that the trout living in it were sightless. Walter wasted three matches trying to light the soggy wood, drank water from puddles but was afraid to eat what berries and mushrooms he saw. Night came and he shivered beneath a rock ledge.
    The next afternoon Walter came to a brook and followed it. By then he had begun to feel feverish. A music he’d never heard before rose from the stream. The notes had colors as well as sounds, bright threads woven into the water’s flow. Some of that bright water splashed up on the bank. It was green and shimmering and he scooped it up into his palm and it became a feather. Wind rustled the branches and he imagined an armada of zeppelins rubbing the treetops.
    He heard a dog bark and thought it might be yet another hallucination, but he staggered up to a ridge crest to be sure. On one side was a farmhouse surrounded by fields and an orchard. On the other, no angled rise but a gray wall suspended over a cove like an iceberg, the cliff’s looming presence muting the afternoon sunlight. In the cove’s deepest section, directly under the cliff face, a purl of smoke drifted above the trees, but that was at least a furlong away. A dreary place, but a fire couldn’t be smelled or seen. He stayed three days and three nights, each dawn stealing apples and corn from the farm, gaining his strength back and allowing his