N. D. Hall lives in Pennsylvania. He writes sometimes and other times he doesn’t.
Seaworthy
by N. D. Hall
I should’ve known I was fucked when Toby came back alone.
“You couldn’t find another goddamn deckhand anywhere on the island?” I shouted.
He shrugged. “They’re all on other boats. Everyone’s trying to get their crab pots in before the squall hits.”
That was disappointing, yet not surprising. As tight-knit as we islanders were, our own hauls came first. Once again, my kin and neighbors apparently forgot how many times I stepped in when they were short-handed. “Did you check More For Shore?”
“Only old people and a couple tourists are dining there. I’m all you got, uncle.”
I wasn’t going to risk losing my crabs the week before Summerfest’s peak pricing. If I only had one deckhand, he’d have to sweat his ass off. “Get on board. We need to…”
That’s when I saw his pasty face bobbing like a white buoy against the twilight as he ran down the pier. “What the hell is he doing here?”
The lighthouse’s rotating beam revealed Chad fucking Tanner, still wearing his apron with the emblazoned More For Shore logo. He was everything I despise about mainlanders rolled into one person. The boy was too much of a sissy to handle a live crab, so stupid that he thought a deadrise was a weightlifting move, always giggled while riding in a golf cart through our narrow streets, and constantly waxed poetic about how beautiful the sunrises are here.
Those of us who make our living from the sea know there’s nothing pretty about heading out against the cold winds before dawn. We understand that golf carts last longer than cars in our salty air. Most importantly, we don’t flinch when crabs pinch us as we haul full pots into our deadrise workboats.
Unlike the tolerable mainlanders, he didn’t leave at the end of last year’s tourist season. Instead, he rented Old Lady Parker’s late grandson’s room and got a job as a prep cook at More For Shore. And, worst of all, my sweet daughter Shelly fell for him so hard that she won’t consider my honest opinions about him. Watching her hug him always made my blood boil.
“Hey,” he wheezed when he got in earshot. “Shelly came back to the kitchen. She… she said you needed help.”
Toby said, “Last time you came with us, you spent half the morning puking over the side.”
“Goddamn right,” I said. “You were more dead weight than an anchor on a broken chain.”
Chad still hadn’t caught his breath. “I want another chance.”
I only gave him a chance last time because Shelly asked with her puppy-dog eyes, and she wasn’t here to do it again. But every crab lost was money lost, and I needed another set of hands. “Fuck it. Let’s get those crab pots out before the squall rolls in.”
Toby and I hopped aboard Seaward Bitch while Chad cautiously clambered over the gap between my deadrise workboat and the water. I started the engine while Toby untied all but the mooring line on the bow, which Chad managed to fumble free from its cleat after I snapped, “It’s a goddamn bowline, not an algebra problem!”
I’ve set out on Seaward Bitch thousands of times, and always got a rush from turning until all I saw was the bow pointed at my line of gold and maroon buoys. I should have been thinking about the oncoming storm, but something Chad said echoed in my head.
I called him into the cockpit. “Why was Shelly hanging around More For Shore?”
“She’s working tonight.”
“I thought she liked serving breakfast.”
“Yeah, well…” Chad searched for words. “She hasn’t been feeling well in the mornings.”
I used to know exactly where Shelly was and what she was doing. But since Chad moved to the island, she drifted away. What started as the occasional evening out stretched into overnight, weekends then whole weeks away. Without my only child, and my wife long gone, I had no one else in my life when I wasn’t at sea.
As Toby got the gloves out, he chimed in, “There’s something different about her. Like she’s got a glow. “
A man can only deny the truth to himself for so long. “Toby, take the wheel. Chad, get some gloves on and come to the bow.”
Chad stayed silent as I swung the pot puller’s mechanized arm into position over the water and said, “So, my daughter is getting sick in the morning and glowing. Be honest, boy: What happened when she pissed on a stick?”
He gulped. “Sir, your daughter and I love each…”
I bore down on him, “Not what I asked, asshole!”
The lighthouse’s passing beam made his pale skin look stark white. “It wasn’t planned, but…”
The wind picked up as I shouted, “Wasn’t enough to shit all over our island, was it? You had to piss in our gene pool, too.”
Chad seemed to shrink as the falling waves lowered the boat. “I’m going to propose to her.”
“You think I’d let my pride and joy marry an unseaworthy shit like you?”
Toby killed the engine, letting the boat rock in the rising waves. “Why aren’t you pulling up the pots?”
I ignored him to continue laying into Chad. “You plan to raise a family in Old Lady Parker’s spare room?”
Chad finally grew enough of a spine to straighten himself. “She wants to leave the island!”
I damn near slugged him before Toby stepped between us. “Uncle, listen. Chad may not be one of us, but I’ve never seen Shelly happier than when she’s with him.”
Toby was right in a way I couldn’t deny, and also couldn’t accept. When Chad came around, Shelly smiled wider than she had since her thirteenth birthday, back when my ex-wife was still with us. When it was just her and me, she became a moody, mopey teenager. At twenty, she moved and acted like a robot, doing the minimum with her chores and waitress job, barely talking to me at the dinner table.
Something about Chad revived her in a way that I never could. God knows I tried. When she decided to be an artist, I bought all the supplies she asked for, knowing she’d only paint the landscapes and towns she saw on the mainland. And when she said all she needed was space, I kept my distance.
That left me so far away that I couldn’t protect her from assholes like the one standing in front of me.
I stabbed a finger at Chad. “My daughter’s not marrying a mainlander, especially not this mainlander.”
Toby said, “Every other guy on the island is her cousin. Hell, I am.”
“He wants to take her away.”
“Shelly’s miserable here. She wants a new start, like Aunt Patty…”
I completely forgot about Chad and turned to Toby. “Don’t speak of her!”
Toby shut up and raised his open hands defensively. “The storm shifted our way. Let’s head back.”
“No!” I shouted. “We’re not abandoning full fucking pots!” Losing the crabs would be bad enough, and there was a real good chance I’d lose thousands of dollars’ worth of gear too. Storms have been known to drag buoys and pots of the bay, never to be seen again.
“We’ll have to sort and unload in the rain if we don’t return now,” Toby said.
Chad put on the extra pair of gloves. “You heard the captain. We’re not abandoning full fucking pots! I came out here to prove myself, and I’m going to do it.”
Maybe there was a grain of salt in the boy. “Toby, pilot. Chad, remember how to secure pots?” After he nodded, I said, “Do it for each one I pull in.”
Toby grumbled his way to the cockpit as I fed the line through the puller’s robotic arm. Chad flinched when the first mesh crate teeming with pinching blue shell crabs came out, but steeled himself and pulled it onto the deck. He lashed it down with bungee cords as I signaled for Toby to move to the next buoy, ignoring how close the flashes of lightning came more quickly and brightly than the lighthouse’s beam. Before long, we had the last pot out of the water. After it was secured, exhaustion hit like a riptide.
I yelled, “Full throttle to the dock!” over the echoing thunder. Toby pushed the gear shift forward. It was a tough run, and Chad came through as well as a green mainlander could. I’m not one to get mushy, but I didn’t want to punch his pasty face for once.
Before I could tell him, though, that pasty face stretched in fear.
I didn’t have to look to know there was an incoming thick cloudburst behind me. I could tell by the eerily calm air and the waves flattening out. The sensation is scarier than an SOS over the radio or an ear-splitting foghorn.
The squall was here.
“Get low!” I dropped to my knees, gripped the gunwale tight, and kept my body loose to roll with the motion. Toby turned sharply into the wall of white fury rushing towards us—he knew cutting through the crests was better than letting them throw you around. Chad crouched before we shot up over the first wave and held on as we fell, the deck rising to meet us.
Wind slapped Seaward Bitch like God’s backhand. Rain followed—sheets of near-horizontal drops as long as knives. Chad was just a yard in front of me, and barely visible.
A crab pot broke free from its bungee cord and slammed into Chad’s hip as the lightning cracked and the stern dropped almost vertically down. He fell into darkness dotted by glints of light in heavy raindrops.
Even though I was often called the crabbiest crabber among the crabby crabbers of our island, everyone shut up when I boasted that I had the best safety record. How I felt about Chad didn’t matter. No one would die while I was in charge.
I released the gunwale and slid down the wet deck. My hand hit Chad’s ankle before he tipped over the edge. I squeezed his soaked sock until Seaward Bitch sharply dipped.
In the split-second we rested in the trough of waves, I wrapped a bungee cord around his leg with the same motion I used to secure thousands of crab pots. Seaward Bitch rose again, so I put myself against the stern, resolving to ride this wave out without being secured. I made my body loose to move with the force of nature.
But that damn loose crab pot fell back.
Over a hundred pounds of metal and pinching crabs crashed into my face. Seaward Bitch plunged off the crest and landed hard. The crab pot would have taken me overboard if I hadn’t managed to grab a curved cleat.
My whole body hung next to the spinning propeller. Waves crashed louder than the diesel engine’s chugging, but I still screamed “Chad!” when I felt my fingers slipping out of my gloves. He was where I tied him, eyes wide open despite his pupils getting pelted by raindrops.
All he had to do was reach out—and he couldn’t do it. His muscles twitched like a boy on a high diving board too scared to take that final step.
I saved his life, and he was going to let me die.
Right after I started to think he wasn’t the sorriest landlubber to set foot on our island, he proved he was.
Seaward Bitch dropped down another trough. The impact shook my hand free from the glove. I swung with my other arm, but grabbed only air.
For an eternity, I was weightless, watching Chad’s mouth open in a big circle as I fell away from Seaward Bitch before the lighthouse’s beam washed over the million drops from the propeller.
Everything went white.
And then—black water filling my ears, unremitting coldness sapped heat from my body, and brine surged down my throat.
I managed a few strokes before being overwhelmed by how pointless it was to try. I couldn’t tell seaward from landward from up to down any longer. Years of hauling crab pots may have made me strong, but age stripped away my endurance.
And if I made it back, what did I have to return to? An island where my only willing deckhand was my nephew, who only helped so he could inherit Seaward Bitch and rename her? Or my daughter, who was knocked up by the saddest shit I’ve ever set eyes on and wanted to leave me? Why return to land if there was nothing worth fighting for there?
There was serenity in surrendering to the endless, freezing darkness.
I would have found it, if I could have stopped hating Chad fucking Tanner.
His name would not be my last word. My hatred for him was greater than any I have ever known towards anyone. He had to pay.
I kicked upwards and stroked my arms, my head getting lighter with each motion. Consciousness kept creeping away from me, slipping away no matter how I clung to it.
For an instant, I passed out. Everything became nothing, like slipping into dreamless sleep.
But I brought myself back from oblivion by thinking about Chad, and how I would not let him have Shelly. The combination of heated hatred for him and warm love for her ignited enough strength for this old body to scoop handfuls of saltwater beneath it.
I don’t know how long I fought my way up, dragged sideways by the currents as I followed bubbles escaping from my lips. It took more strength than I thought I had to keep swimming until a metal buoy clanged against my skull.
Pure whiteness stung my eyes when the lighthouse’s beam passed over.
Through furious blinks, I made out thousands of little circles forming and disappearing. They were raindrops landing on a calm sea, falling straight, making never ending circles. I couldn’t see the boat—they were probably back at the docks by now.
This was the other side of a squall. God’s rage and fury gave way to gentle drizzle. Tiny waves lapped against my beard.
Cold leeched every sensation from my body, leaving me too cold to even shiver. My mouth tasted like the bottom of a crab basket and my throat was as rough as jerky. No air passed through my nose; the crab pot had smashed it flat. But at least I could see the coastline.
Getting to land was my first priority. This was the worst case of hypothermia I’ve ever had, and I’ve gotten drenched while pulling up mussels in the winter. I had also swallowed a lot of saltwater, which could also kill me.
Everyone on the island knew how Old Lady Parker’s grandson fell overboard while hauling up a pot. They yanked him out and, after a moment of hacking, he seemed fine. But, after sipping water the next night, he couldn’t stop coughing, even after his lips went blue. I was told he puked and collapsed face-first into it.
The church wasn’t big enough to hold the whole island at once, so we held his memorial service at More For Shore a few days after his death. Everyone argued about whether to call it “dry drowning” or “secondary drowning” or “delayed drowning” as if the words for why he died mattered.
What mattered was me getting back to land. I was not going to die without telling Shelly that Chad abandoned her father at sea. I’d tell everyone. The islanders would make his name a term of disgrace for his cowardice, as in, “Don’t be a Chad Tanner when the storm comes,” or, “That Chad Tanner wouldn’t even care for his own sick children.”
When word about Chad spread, Shelly would kick him out of her life. He’d be jeered and hooted back to the mainland. She’d come back home. As for the baby—we’d have months to figure that out. If she kept him, I’d make him into more of a man than his biological father could ever be.
My body was stiffer than a fillet board. A lazy man would have clung to the crab line waiting for rescue, but Dad made me work since I could walk. The same spirit that had me scooping crab pots before school now drove me forward. I raised my hands and grabbed the algae-covered line tethered to the shore. I used the same motion I perfected over years of pulling up crab pots to drag myself back to shore.
Each step felt like I was covered in lead sinkers when I trudged onto the beach. My muscles wanted nothing more than to flop down on the soft sand, but I knew damn right well every second counted. I had to tell my tale, and then get to a hospital. A few hours under a hot blanket, and I’d be able to feel something—even wet—again.
The lights were out in the beachfront bungalows. Those were just for tourists anyway. I had to go into town to find someone.
A couple of streets in the lighthouse’s rotating beam revealed two figures. I could tell they were mainlanders by his ugly Hawaiian shirt and her revealing sundress. They both sheltered under those cheap umbrellas sold in the souvenir stores, like they always do when it gets a little moist.
She shrieked as light washed over me. His jaw dropped as he shoved her behind him. It was probably the first time they’d seen a fisherman who wasn’t on a box of fish sticks. They might’ve called for help if I asked nicely. Instead, I flipped them off, as I usually do when mainlanders cross my path.
Before anything else, I had to tell the story of Chad’s cowardice to another islander. I could die happy after doing that.
But I couldn’t find any of my people. Every shop closed early, and the streets ahead were vacant.
The lighthouse beam’s next pass went over More For Shore’s parking lot, which was packed with golf carts. Normally, we islanders steer clear of that tourist trap, so something big was going on tonight. Strange I hadn’t heard about it; stranger still that so many people would be willing to drive through bad weather. Then again, it wouldn’t be the first time the people I grew up with “forgot” to invite me to a town meeting or social event. Apparently, I offend some of my more sensitive neighbors when I say what I mean.
I plodded towards the sea green awning. The bright neon light added a pink cast to the darkness beneath it, but I still recognized that pasty face bobbing like a white buoy in the shadows under the sea-green awning, smoking a cigarette with the other prep cooks.
Chad. Fucking. Tanner.
The stiffness vanished from my limbs. Powered by the same hatred that let me drag myself out of the ocean, I barreled towards him.
Chad had the same wide eyes and silent screaming mouth as he did while I fell overboard when he saw me close the distance. He deserved a torrent of the foulest language ever known to man, but instead I relished how it felt to squeeze his neck with both hands. He flailed his arms, smacking my cheek so feebly that I barely felt it.
The prep cooks’ screams rose around me like a ground swell, but I didn’t care. This was justice. Let them charge me with whatever crimes they wanted. For me, for Shelly, this mainlander asshole had to die.
Feminine hands ripped at my soaked flannel sleeves but couldn’t pull me away. Those same hands moved up and pulled two fingers from my hand as easily as if they were legs on a steamed crab.
The hands’ owner came into view. Through the black veil and terrified expression, I recognized Shelly. Her lips moved just enough to form the word, “Daddy?”
She wore all black. I finally saw that Chad wore a black suit and tie instead of his prep cook apron.
The doors swung open. My neighbors and kin stood there, clad in the same mourning clothes they wore to Old Lady Parker’s grandson’s memorial service. Through the spaces between them, I spotted my crabbing license photo, blown up and propped on an easel. Around it were flowers and other memorabilia, such as the glove I left in the cleat and the portrait Shelly made, which was the only picture that I ever smiled for because I looked at her the whole time she painted it.
This was my…
How long was I swimming? How long did I lose consciousness? How could I tell?
But the rain… did the storm pass and another came through?
Why couldn’t I remember taking a breath when I surfaced?
The other islanders had always stiffened when I passed and their voices got quieter. Now, those competitors and neighbors stared at me with abject horror. We had all wronged each other in some way—fishing in their territories without asking, stealing gear from unattended boats, slandering each other to the buyers— reflexively striking like crabs caught in a pot.
I tried to tell them what Chad did and that I still loved Shelly, no matter what I was, but the only sound I emitted was a gurgling hiss.
Something came out of my mouth and landed with a small cracking sound on the cement porch. It was a blue shell crab, so small I would’ve thrown it back, waving a chunk of my rancid tongue in its tiny pincers.
Enough slivers of light slipped between the islanders for me to see my ungloved hand was pallid, puffy, and wrinkled. Black ichor seeped from the stumps of my missing fingers. In the dim reflection of the open door’s window, I saw something dangling in front of my chest. It was my cheek, ripped off by Chad’s punch, caught in my tangled, salt-caked beard, with a grim line of teeth grinning above it.
Some islanders grabbed their knives or balled their fists, instinctively ready to fight the inhuman thing before them. Toby shouted, “Don’t. He was one of us.” A few tried to shove past him, but my nephew, the one man on the island who would always crew for me, stood his ground.
Those people didn’t let the fact they came to my memorial service stop them from wanting to get one last shot at me.
It proved Patty, my ex-wife, was right when she said everyone on the island secretly hated me. She wanted a fresh start on the mainland. I wouldn’t allow it; my ancestors were islanders, and my child would be too. She and I fought for months until I told her I’d drown Shelly before I let her leave me, and she knew damn right well I meant it. So she boarded the ferry alone and never sent a letter. I changed my boat’s name from Patricia to Seaward Bitch as a final insult to her.
I looked down at my daughter, my anchor to this world, all that kept me from going adrift. She cradled Chad. As he gasped, she sobbed.
I reached down to her with my ungloved hand. She recoiled.
Anger rushed through me. After all I did for her, she… but then I saw her big, watery eyes, the ones she used to make me do anything she wanted, and I thought of all I did to her. She tried to take some control of her life back through Wicca, but that silly magic did nothing. Her art, so many paintings of the mainland, showed where she wanted to be. And when a man showed up who could take her there, I wanted him gone.
I gave her everything she wanted, without ever giving her a chance to be free. I finally understood that I kept her from being happy to keep myself happy.
Slowly, Shelly rose. She plucked away a live crab pulling at my earlobe.
“Please,” she said, her voice cracking like broken china, “go away. I’ll always love you, but I never want to see you again.”
She spoke firmly, not begging with puppy-dog eyes like a little girl but asserting what she needed as a woman, and severed my last tether with those words. I always gave Shelly whatever she told me she wanted, and I always will.
The islanders became quieter after I turned away. I can’t say whether tears poured from my eyes or only seawater drained from the sockets in my skull, but everything got blurry.
My legs stiffened again as I followed the trail of sea lettuce, sandy grooves, and wet footprints back to the surf. No tourists got in my path as I slogged through the empty, foggy streets. No one chased or followed me. They wanted me gone as much as I wanted to be gone.
Seeing boats floating at the docks was my first memory, so it felt right this would be the place it ends for me. The lighthouse’s rotating beam revealed Seaward Bitch stretching against her mooring lines, her windows tilting as if she were wishing me goodbye with more understanding than Patty ever had. Toby, my nephew, the islander who hated me the least, would take care of her.
There was nothing left for me on solid ground.
The water lay ahead. I felt the same rush I always did when I turned towards the open sea.
The rip current cradled me, gentle as my mother’s had once been. I let myself go loose, floating away from land for the last time. Crabs picked away at my rotting meat, a fair repayment for their many brothers and sisters I fed to ungrateful mainlander tourists.
Those heavy grudges I bore towards the other islanders drifted away like shells in the surf; what the preacher said about God giving man dominion over nature died as all lies must; and, as I sank further, the guilt I felt for keeping Shelly on the island diffused out of my flattened veins.
In time, I forgot the names of my neighbors, the name of my island, and even my own name. Some details come and go, lost like colors in the depths. All that’s left is my memory of when I saw what I loved and hated combined in a way that I could not keep, nor destroy.
That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it until the undertow takes these words away.
Copyright 2026 by N. D. Hall