Read The Last Boat Home for Free Online Page A

into cold that sealed around her. Her muscles seized up in the initial shock, until her foot brushed a slime of seaweed and she kicked and broke the surface. Near the Frøya ’s anchor line, she paddled the feeling back into her limbs and swallowed air through teeth that chattered. Spreading her arms, she swam away from the splash of the waves against the stilts that lifted the boathouse from the water.
    Across the fjord stood the Reiersen shipyard, its graving dock still empty. Else propelled herself towards it and thought of Lars. She knew it would be foolish to meet him later. Her mother would catch the bus back to town after dinner for the evening’s prayer meeting at the bedehus , but her father would be home, smoking in the dining room as he did every Sunday on his night off. Johann was the last in a long line of shrimpers. He had been sailing the Frøya since the War, when the Gymnasium on Elvebakken was closed and requisitioned by Nazi officers for barracks. By the time the Germans had been driven out, his own father deemed he had learned more at sea than he ever would in a classroom. Day after day, year after year, the weather worked him over on his father’s boat. The sun and the wind and the salt and the cold cracked his skin like a battered fender.
    On most evenings after supper, Johann would put on his layers of wool and rubber and head outside to the trawler moored in front of the boathouse. Else would listen from the kitchen or dining room to the faint, thudding chop of its motor rupturingthe silence. Its drum bounced off the mountains that climbed out of the fjord, echoing its farewell even after it had gone. She pictured her father rolling his first cigarette while he sailed under the eye of the lighthouse that signalled to the sea and, as the Frøya’s wheelhouse filled with smoke, unscrewing the lid of his thermos and treating his coffee to a squirt of homebrew. He would turn the radio off once he had heard the weather forecast and his boat would crash into the darkness ahead until, to the aft, beyond the trawl doors suspended like ears on either side of the net, there was nothing. No trace of land. No sign of home.
    Through the night, the waves would pound the cabin walls to wisps and the prow would plummet and pitch. All the while her father would consult his charts, studying the markings that had been her grandfather’s life’s work. The lamp would swing a thin light over the deck as his net dropped into the deep and, when the time came to drag it up, he would spill his catch into the receptacle on board and sieve off the shrimp at the bottom of the container. He would set them aside to be stewed in a vat of seawater before slitting the throats of the cod, ling and coalfish and wringing the intestines of each flounder through an incision below the eyes. One by one, he would toss the fish into piles that leaked blood over his boots. At the end of the night, after five or six drops, he would deliver his haul to the Fish Repository in town.
    Else had swum a hundred metres or more before she rested her legs and searched again for her father’s skiff. She spotted him in the distance, saw the orange of his oilskins against the water. As she began to circle back to the pier, she thought of his fingers crushing her thigh at church that morning and resolved not to meet Lars. She changed her mind as soon as she had decided. She would have to go to him. He would be expecting her.
    Else heaved herself out of the fjord, grazing her shins on the knots of mussels that were gummed to the bottom of the pier.She wrapped the towel around her shoulders and scrambled to the farmhouse. When she appeared in the dining room dried and dressed, the tangles combed from her hair, the food was already on the table. She took her seat next to her father, who had docked the skiff minutes before. Side by side, they bowed their heads and folded their hands.
    After the prayer, her mother served the boiled fish. Else stripped it of