Katey Hoagland (sample)
Katey Hoagland
by Mark R. Bailey
CHAPLAIN DONNE is powerless to look away. Beyond the open chapel doors, beyond stone markers sloping toward the sea, he sees vessels abandoned in the tidal marshes. A collection of foundering driftwood-colored barques and saltbank schooners tilt in tall grasses. The bowsprits, strakes, and keelsons contradict any notion that Donne and his parishioners are blessed. Ribs jut from the sands like great fingers, some grasping for old glories, others flipping off the sleek new sloops and ketches gliding by in the channel. The once mighty alpha wolves of the Yankee fleet are now bleached bones, pale reminders of muscular passions and distant violence.
Donne smoothes his thinning hair and sighs. As his breath passes his lips, his thought whispers into the still morning like a whale spout on the bay. Grey ghosts. Surprised and embarrassed by his slip, he turns back to his flock.
Fidgeting expressions in the sea of faces calm to attentiveness. Some are puzzled. Some who have been preoccupied with their grief note a shift in the chapel’s current.
He steps away from the lectern as tissues bob moist eyes. Tragedy rattles the air. Gazes weigh heavily on folded hands and the cold stone floor, across which a grave chill laps good Sunday shoes.
Except for Katey Hoagland, the widows wear black. Katey wears a midnight blue dress, dark gloves, and a thousand-year sorrow in her absent gaze. She seems to see the arrangement of flowers with ribbons, notes, and strong mens’ photographs on the steps of the altar. At the same time, she is far away, unable to concentrate on any one thing long enough to understand. Perhaps, she thinks of Carl – shoulders as wide as cliffs, energy as untamable as a nor’easter – waving to her from the helm. In fact, she is reflecting on the wreck of the Upthalian, not the largest of the ghosts of Boothbay in the flats, but to her the most tragic. Its four masts fell long ago, yet its soaring bowsprit is still erect nearly a century after being laid to rest.
(to be continued)…