Of Sea and Cloud by Jon Keller

Of Sea and Cloud by Jon Keller

Author:Jon Keller
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: F+W Media


The next evening. Osmond sat at the end of the bar in his house. Rhonda and Dolly were in their bedroom and he could hear Dolly’s constant chatter. He held a glass of scotch in his hand. An open bible lay on the bar and there had been a time when the men in those pages were the men in his life and miracles were commonplace and belief and truth were one but belief was no longer truth and the time of miracles was over. Faith was forever and Osmond’s faith was in his ability to navigate a world as empty and chaotic as the whirlwind but now suddenly he felt that faith cracking.

He sipped his scotch. The south wall of his house was built of floor-to-ceiling picture windows that framed his wharf and boat and beyond that the reach and the bridge that arched across to Mason’s Island. To the southwest an archipelago stretched offshore to Spencer Ledges and the sea-swell rolled and heaved against the outside ledges. White spray hung in the air.

On the wall opposite Osmond stood an eight-foot-long saltwater fish tank with a lobster the size of his leg lying motionless in it. Osmond drank his scotch and looked to the lobster. There you are, he whispered. I see you waiting.

He went back to his reading and read several verses and as he read his lips mouthed the words and his right hand slid a check in circles on the bar top. The check was for $35,000. Ten thousand pounds of lobster at three fifty a pound. Osmond pressed it into the bar top to still it. If Nicolas were alive he would deposit the check into the business account and split it down the middle. Any expenses incurred throughout the year would be likewise split.

But Osmond’s world had shifted.

Chimney was in prison and Nicolas was dead and Julius had bought a new boat and moved out. Whether Julius was to be trusted or not Osmond had no idea. Osmond had simultaneously abandoned his brother and his beliefs for a woman and he’d lost both her and their child. And he’d later sacrificed Nicolas his only friend with his own hands. Osmond understood these three deaths to be elements of providence and he understood that fear and fragility came in apocalyptic waves which rose and fell with the corrosive power of tides and what remained when fear finished was love and faith and love and faith together meant blood.

But I have this against you, Osmond whispered as if speaking to the lobster. That you, you have abandoned love.

And here he sat about to abandon Nicolas’s son William. But that was not a choice of his. That was a choice he and Nicolas made together and they had never once doubted that decision but neither Nicolas nor Osmond had ever doubted who would die first. Nicolas had not been the sort of man to die. But Osmond was not the sort of man to abandon his family. Not again.



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