Twice Loved (copy2) Read Online Free PDF

good-luck charms, that would see the ships safely back to shore; the retired shipsmith often saw his son take his place with anvil and hammer aboard an outgoing whaler.
    And so it was with Josiah Dalton. A fifth-generation cooper, he had passed down his knowledge of barrel making to his son and had watched Rye sail away as he himself had done when he was younger.
    Barrels were constructed on shore, then dismantled and packed aboard ships to be reassembled as needed when whales were captured. Coopers, therefore, had the advantage of plying their trade either on land or aboard a whaleship, choosing the risk of a voyage for the chance of high stakes, for a cooper’s portion of the profits—his lay—was fourth only to those of the captain and the first and second mates.
    Josiah Dalton had, in his time, earned himself three substantial lays, but had, too, suffered the miseries of three voyages, so now he shaped his barrels with both feet on solid ground.
    His back was hunched from years of straddling the shaving horse and pulling a heavy steel drawknife toward his knees. His hands were rivered with bulging blue veins and were widespread from clutching the double-handled tool. His torso seemed wrought of iron and was so muscular that it out-proportioned his hips, giving him the burly look of an ape when he stood.
    But his face was gentle, seamed with lines reminiscent of the grains in the wood he worked. The left cheek was permanently rounded in a smile from accommodating the brierwood pipe that was never absent from between his teeth. His left eye wore a perennial squint and seemed tinted by the very hue of the blue-gray smoke that always drifted past it, as if through the years it had absorbed the fragrant wisps somehow. The frizzled hair about his head was gray and curly, as curly as the miles of wood shavings that had fallen from his knives.
    Rye paused in the open double doors of the cooperage, peering in, taking a minute to absorb the sights, sounds, and scents on which he’d been weaned. Shelves of barrels lined the walls—plump-waisted barrels, flat-sided hogsheads, and an occasional oval, which could not roll with the pitch of a ship. Partially constructed barrels sat like the petals of daisies in their hoops, while the staves of the next wet barrel soaked in a vat of water. Drawknives were hung neatly along one wall while the grindstone sat below them in the same place as always. The croze—planes for cutting grooves at each end of the barrel stave—adzes with their curved blades, and jointing planes were up high off the damp floor, just as Josiah had always taught they must be.
    Josiah. There he was—with a billow of fresh wood curls covering his boot, which pressed against the foot pedal of the shaving horse, clamping a stave in place as he shaped it.
    He’s grown much older, Rye thought, momentarily saddened.
    Josiah looked up as a shadow fell across the door of his cooperage. Slowly, he raised his veined hand to remove the pipe from his mouth. Even more slowly, he swung his leg over the seat of the shaving horse and got to his feet. Telltale tears illuminated his eyes at the sight of his son, tall and strapping in the doorway.
    The thousand greetings they’d promised themselves, if only they could ever see each other alive again, eluded them both now, until Josiah broke the silence with the most mundane remark.
    “Y’re home.” His voice was perilously shaky.
    “Aye.” Rye’s was perilously deep.
    “I heard y’d docked aboard the  Omega.”
    Rye only nodded. They stood in silence, the old man drinking in the younger, the younger absorbing the familiar scene before him, which he’d sometimes doubted he’d ever see again. The emotions peculiar to such homings held them each, for the moment, bound to the earthen floor, until at last Rye moved, striding toward his father with arms outflung. Their embrace was firm, muscular, crushing, for Rye’s arms, too, had known their share of pulling drawknives.