The Old Rowboat (Part 3)
The storm came on Friday night, two nights before the race.
Astrid woke at two in the morning because the rain sounded like somebody throwing small stones at her window. She got Ronan up. They ran across the yard in their boots with one flashlight between them, and when they pulled the barn door open, the water was already flowing across the floor, brown and quick, and it was flowing under the boat.
The roof had let go over the back corner. The boat stood on its two low blocks, and the water was over the blocks. The new varnish was twelve hours old. It was wet and soft and dull, and there were pieces of straw stuck along the side of it.
They should have put something over the boat before they went to bed. They both knew it, and neither of them said it.
Ronan sat down on an upturned bucket and did not speak for a long time.
“We could just tell people we’re not coming,” he said finally. “Nobody would mind.”
“The shop knows,” Astrid said. “You told the whole shop.”
They looked at the boat. If they took it out on Sunday and it opened up in front of the village, everybody on the harbor wall would watch it happen. That was the obvious risk, and it was an easy one to say out loud. The other one was harder. If they stopped now, the boat went back under the tarp, and it stayed there, and in a year nobody would remember that they had ever pulled the tarp off.
They started at half past two. They swept the water out with a yard brush and two buckets, and then they lifted the boat across to the dry side of the barn. At four they lit their grandfather’s old gas heater and sat with their backs against the wall, watching the varnish go from dull to almost right.
At six Astrid rubbed the whole hull down and brushed on the second coat, slowly, in long strokes, the way the man in Nenagh had drawn it on the receipt.
By nine on Saturday morning it was still not hard. Ronan pressed his thumb into the wood beside the new board, and it left a small mark.
“That won’t be dry by tomorrow,” he said.
“Then it goes in the water soft,” Astrid said. “If it sinks, it sinks in front of everybody.”