Read Ozark Trilogy 3: And Then There'll Be Fireworks for Free Online

Gabriel John McDaniels the 21 st that he was just a tad less related to her than the other four, but they all recognized it as a burden to be borne. Relations, like poison plants and balky Mules and the occasional foolfish spoiling a catch, were part of the territory; wasn’t anybody didn’t have kinfolk they’d just as soon not of.
    They’d had their instructions from the Grannys:
    “You leave her alone, she’ll leave you alone.” Same instructions as for most pesky and viperous things in this world, and they’d proved accurate enough. She sat there on her barrel by the hour, peering through hooded eyes they none of them would of cared to look into directly. If she wanted a drink of water, or something to eat, or a blanket to wrap round her strong thin shoulders, she got it without bothering any of them. If there was anything she wanted that she didn’t have—and likely there was, though it was said she lived a spare and scrimped existence on her lonely mountaintop—she didn’t mention it. And if a line fouled near to her, or a solar collector was wrong in its tilt, she fixed whatever was awry, without fuss and without error and with no assistance from the crew.
    “Uncanny, she is,” muttered Haven McDaniels Brightwater the 4 th , some six hours out to sea. “Just un canny!” He cleared his throat and stared up at the gray flat lid of the sky as if he was indifferent to the whole thing, just mentioning it in passing. “Can’t say as how I wouldn’t rather of had something else along ... say a serpent, or maybe a Yallerhound.”
    Gabriel John McDaniels spat over the side to signify his disgust and demanded to know what Haven McDaniels had come along for, if that was the way he felt about it.
    “What’d you expect?” he asked, jamming his hands into his pockets and setting his feet wide against the roll of the boat. “You expect a fine lady sitting on a tusset? With needlework to her hand, maybe, and a kerchief to her delicate little nose? That is Troublesome of Brightwater back there, just as agreed upon with the Grannys, and exactly as advertised.”
    “I know it,” said Haven McDaniels sullenly. “You think I don’t know it?”
    “Well, then,” Gabriel John answered him, “there’s no call to comment on it. I strongly misdoubt the Grannys would of offered each of us the sum they did if we’d been taking a Yallerhound to Kintucky. We’re being paid for the hazard of the thing ... and she’s rightly named, is Troublesome! Rightly named, her as could fry your heart in your chest with no more’n her two blue eyes, if she’d a mind to.”
    The captain heard that, and it didn’t surprise him. He’d heard the rest, too, but he’d been ignoring it. One of the advantages to captaining so small a boat was that neither crew nor anybody else aboard could keep anything from him. He spoke up sharp and quick.
    ‘That’s enough of that, Gabriel John McDaniels,” he rapped out. “ Days we’ve got ahead of us, this trip. Bad weather and poor food and none of us truly fit ... last thing we need here is superstitious claptrap fouling the air.”
    “Now, Captain— “
    “I said it was enough . You hear me? I can speak louder, should there be call for to do so. You look to the weather, Gabriel John, and to this leaky woodbucket we travel in so precariously, and leave the tall tales to the tadlings and the Grannys. I’m purely astonished, hearing such stuff from a full-grown man, and him with four years’ full service now on the water.”
    Gabriel John McDaniels was not impressed, and he was not about to drop his eyes to the captain. He’d not spent his own childhood roaming the Wilderness Lands of Marktwain with the man, but his daddy had; and many a night he’d seen the two of them with more whiskey in them than had pleased his mother. He held Captain Adam Sheridan Brightwater the 3 rd in no awe.
    “You’re obliged to take that stand,” he said, speaking right up. “We know that, all of us.