Free The Boatmaker by John Benditt Page A

.”
    The boatmaker’s face hurts. A purple moon circles one eye, and there is a scythe of dried blood on his cheek. His body is sore, as if he’d been punched and kicked when he was down. What he doesn’t want to admit, even to himself, is that he doesn’t remember much of how he got the marks. The last thing he remembers is being in her room at the Mandrake, thinking his money would soon be gone.
    That is all his memory holds before he woke up in a big room above the one where they are sitting: a bare open space with iron-framed beds extending from the walls. On most of the beds, the mattresses were rolled up on metal springs. One or two had the mattresses down flat, their sheets crumpled. When he woke, there was no one else in the room. At first, he thought he was still on Small Island, dreaming. Then he knew he was awake.Slowly the story came back, up to the moment when he knew he had to leave the Mandrake. After that: nothing.
    A woman with an apron around her middle approaches their table, supporting the bottom of a coffee pot with a dish towel. “I’ll have some more, thanks. I think our friend still has most of his,” the walrus says. The woman pours coffee into his mug, looks at the boatmaker, turns and walks away.
    The few others who were sitting at the tables when the two of them sat down have left. They are alone in the big room open on one side to the bluff and the harbor below, its blue surface etched by the long commercial piers.
    The boatmaker lifts the white mug and manages to get some coffee down without spilling. The feeling of being sick is subsiding. He knows that soon he will need to find an outhouse and sit for a long time while everything leaves his body. He sets the mug down with only a slight tremor.
    â€œAs I was saying, the one thing we can’t have on Big Island is fighting. And you seem to find a lot of that. Or it finds you. Maybe you should think about leaving and going back to where you’re from—to your people.”
    His people, the boatmaker thinks. Who are they? His mother, with her drunken breath and beautiful needlework? His father, in the shack on Gallagher’s Point? His brother,under the rectangle of dark turf? The boatmaker doesn’t know who his people are—or if he has any people at all.
    He also doesn’t understand what the walrus is upset about. On Small Island fighting is just fighting. From time to time, every man on Small Island, even Valter and the doctor, gets drunk and gets in a fight or two. It’s nothing special, and no one tells you to leave the island—or mentions any punishment whatsoever. Unless you’ve killed someone.
    â€œI’m not going back,” he says. The two men regard each other, one round and flushed, the other drawn, a sickle of dried blood on his cheek. They lift their mugs. The boatmaker can now pick his up with one hand and convey it to his mouth almost like a normal person.
    â€œThat may be,” says the walrus. “I’m not going to lock you up—yet. But I’m warning you: Big Island is a civilized place. We don’t tolerate people behaving like animals here.”
    The boatmaker looks in his mug. At the bottom he can barely see the moon on the sea. He picks it up and drains it, pushes himself off the wooden bench and stands. He is not steady on his feet, but he manages to turn and walk away, placing his boots with care. There is no doubt in his mind about where he is going after he stops at the outhouse and sits a good long while.
    The woman of the town is where she was when he first saw her. Her drink, translucent and brown, sits infront of her. The smoke from her cigarette is almost invisible. He wonders which of the three dresses she’s wearing. The one she took off the night they went upstairs? Likely not. That one will need mending.
    Through the open door, his carpenter’s eyes can make out the stairs in the hall. They were cut from the edge of