The Whale's Footprints - Rick Boyer Read Online Free

weekend. He removed his dripping slicker and said good
night, then struggled upstairs to the spare bedroom he would share
with Jack. Somehow, he seemed a changed person, illness or no. Was it
the phone call? The words with Jack over Alice Henderson?
    We put the chess set away.
    "It's great to have you here, guy," I said.
I hugged him. I was careful not to hug him too hard or too long. It
might embarrass him. But God, I lived for that.
    "Dad, you okay? You crying?”
    "No, I'm okay. I'm just glad to see you. You
don't have any idea how much I miss you and Tony."
    "But Dad, we're right nearby. We're all here in
New England, right?"
    "Right," I said, and went upstairs.
    "I love you, Dad," he called after me.
    "I love you too, boy," I managed to reply.
"More than anything on earth."
    I did have wet eyes after saying good night to him.
And a lump in my throat, too. My little Jackie was all grown up and
leaving us. He hadn't planned the departure, and maybe didn't even
know it was happening. But there it was, plain as day. That huge,
inexorable clock keeps ticking, swinging its giant pendulum, knocking
away the years. The Great Going On stops for nothing and nobody, and
there's not a thing any of us can do about it.
    I couldn't wait to go out with him to watch the
whales.
 
    TWO
    THE NEXT MORNING, Saturday, Mary and I awoke to the
sound of heavy rain on our bedroom windows and the constant eerie
wail of wind. The moaning rose and fell, rattling the windows in the
gusts, but it never died away. We got up and dressed and went down to
make coffee. While it was brewing, I tapped the barometer.
Twenty-nine point two and rising very slightly.
    " I wonder what happened to the DeGroots?"
asked Mary over the rim of her cup. Her black eyes shone under the
anchor light that hangs over the kitchen table. Her dark hair was
pulled back in a big thick single braid. She was, having spent only
twelve days on the Cape, as dark as a Tahitian.
    "I don't know. With this storm, I'm hoping they
never left. But I don't like not hearing from them, either. It's not
like Jim to keep us in the dark."
    I looked outside at the ugly leaden sky. At the foot
of the bluff, the tide was coming back in, roaring and slamming every
inch of the way. The sea was higher than I'd ever seen it on the bay
side of the Cape. I switched on the short-wave receiver and heard the
reports. We had another day, maybe two, of the heavy rain to look
forward to, but the wind would abate early Sunday. Sensing that the
reception was bad even for a major storm, I went outside on the deck
to see that the antenna mast on the roof had blown over, the lead
disconnected. We were missing a bunch of cedar shingles, too.
    After coffee, we put on our rain gear to take a walk
outside and assess the damage. But before we left I went to the foot
of the stairs and yelled up at the boys to get up. I heard a muted
thumping on the ceiling, which told me they were stirring. Then Mary
and I went down to the beach, leaning into the wind and rain and
shouting to each other over the roar of the surf. We found our yellow
beach umbrella, which we had carefully tied shut and stowed against
the cottage wall, wedged at the base of a sand dune a hundred yards
up the beach. Our lounge chairs were scattered over a thirty-yard
radius, having been swept off the deck in the gusts. But the most
amazing and ominous sight was the water. The ocean had intruded over
our forty yards of beach and was pounding against the base of our
bluff. We skipped and jumped nimbly to avoid the rushes of water that
followed each breaking wave.
    "Charlie! There's so much stuff on the beach.
Look!" I saw piles of brush, large hunks of driftwood, and even
a big metal milk can, rolling and thumping in shallows. Where it had
come from was anybody's guess. Had it washed ashore from some passing
ship? Did it drift to our side of the bay from a dairy in Plymouth or
Provincetown? Heaven only knew. No boats were out on the bay; the
horizon was empty.