The Old Rowboat (Part 4)
Sunday was bright and almost still. By ten o’clock there were fourteen boats at the harbor, most of them from the sailing club down in Killaloe, with fresh paint and matching oars, and one old wooden rowboat with three letters of a name left on the back.
They carried it down the slip. It went into the water and it sat there, and it did not sink. Ronan stood in the lake up to his knees and watched the line of the new board. Nothing came through it. Not yet.
The race was two laps: out around a marker by the island, and back in to the harbor wall. Astrid rowed the first lap. Ronan bailed with a paint tin, because after four minutes the water was coming in — not fast, just a thin steady flow around the ends of the new board, about one tin every two minutes.
The leading boat was past the marker before they reached it. Then a second boat passed them, and then a third. Somebody up on the wall shouted Ronan’s name, twice. On the second lap they changed places, and Astrid bailed, and Ronan rowed badly, and then, for about two hundred meters, well.
They came in fifth out of six. The last boat had gone home early with a broken oar, so there was nobody behind them at all. But the harbor wall was full, and when the boat touched the slip, the noise from up there was, Astrid thought, a lot bigger than fifth place.
An old man in a yellow jacket came down while they were lifting the boat out of the water. He looked at the three letters on the back for a while and said nothing about them.
“I know that boat,” he said. “It’s been off this lake thirty years.”
“It leaks,” Ronan said.
“They all leak.” He put his hand flat on the new board. “Bring it back next July. We’ll put you in the first race, when the water’s flat.”
They carried it up to the barn that evening, sore and sunburned and wet to the waist. Ronan looked around for the tarp for a minute, and then he stopped looking.
They left it off.