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pocket, but she doesn’t want it in her hands as she walks through Harbortown, doesn’t want anyone asking slyly: “A package from the Mainland, eh?”
    She leaves her coat unbuttoned, almost doesn’t need it. The spring air smells of mud. His boots will be wet. He is working again. She hears of him from time to time but pretends not to notice. He’s stopped drinking. But he’s stopped before; she doesn’t expect it to last. This boat is nothing more than foolishness. He won’t finish it. He’ll give up and go back to what he always did before: drink and work, drink and work. And even if he does, by some miracle, finish his ridiculous boat, he’ll never actually leave. Sailing to Big Island. What nonsense. She is afraid. But part of her cannot help but admire.

CHAPTER 4
    In his shed the man of Small Island works on his boat without thinking. When he is sober, he can always find work. After he got well, he took the jobs he found until he had enough money to repay her, with something left over for his journey. Now that the debt is paid, he can work far into the night, as quickly or as slowly as he wishes. No one expects this boat; no one is paying for it. No one even knows about it, except the woman. As spring deepens, the boat grows and takes shape under the maples, whose leaves, now fully open, make shadows like hands on the white canvas extending out into the woods.
    After laying the keel and joining the ribs to it, he fills in the hull, steaming and bending cedar planks into shape. Although he is afraid of the ocean, he has been fascinated by boats since his brother was taken by the sea. He has watched how the boatbuilder families assemble the partsin time-tested ways. But as he works in the shed, he is not exactly imitating: He is making something that is his own. And the boat is teaching him how to build it, showing him at each step what needs doing next.
    He squats on the dirt floor, smoking a cigarette and examining the hull. Cedar planking is now three-quarters of the way up to the gunwales. Spring is almost full. The beginning of summer will be a good time to put the boat in the water. As he looks over his work, he considers how he will get his boat over the bluff and down through the woods to the beach below Harbortown. But before that can happen, there are things to be fashioned, including the sail. And a visit he needs to make.
    At the woman’s house, things are moving easily. She hasn’t seen the man in a while, and when she doesn’t see him, her life takes its own pace, like the pansies coming up in her window box, the crocuses blooming in the woods, the mud drying on the plank sidewalk in Harbortown, sending up showers of dust as heavy boots come down. She goes to work, leaves the store, collects the girl, comes home, makes dinner. She hears Valter has a new woman in Harbortown, which doesn’t surprise—or even particularly interest—her.
    Occasionally her husband comes to her door and knocks his familiar knock: two soft and one loud.Sometimes she lets him come in and take her upstairs. Valter has a violent temper and it wouldn’t be good for things to get any worse than they are now. But it isn’t just to keep the peace that she lets Valter have his way with her. She isn’t strong enough to say no every time. If the other man would claim her—really claim her—perhaps she could. But he doesn’t. He stays in his shed in the woods, working on the sea monster growing up from the dirt floor.
    The package from the Mainland, addressed to her at the general store in a blue clerical hand, sits on the table he left her. The girl asks what is in the package, hoping it’s for her, a birthday present, even though her birthday isn’t until October. The woman doesn’t answer. The days are warmer, and they don’t race toward sunset; they dawdle. Spring has come forward and possessed Small Island. Now in its turn it is