Excerpt from my novel FATE

                                                         Friends Turn when Tides Turn 
                                                     

       It was around three a.m. of the 13th when one of the men later told the skipper, whose hammock was near Moses’s, that he had seen him get up and go up on deck, despite the biting wind and sleet blowing in off the sea. Moses had other things on his mind now, worrying about Kathleen, who was near her time to give birth to their first. However, Moses knew in his heart of hearts that they would be twins. That prophecy he was prepared to put money on, even though he was not a gambling man.
       Fretting over Kathleen would put him in a deep solemn mood at the best of times, but he had expected to be home by now. Now he would not be there for her, though he had promised he would be gone no more than two months. The weather was changing fast, but the skipper thought nothing of it, and if he did, he was not showing that side of him to the crew.   
       Storms were to be expected this time of year in the Arctic.
      He kept reassuring the crew they would return soon, but they doubted the skipper’s judgment and now wanted to turn back for port. The skipper’s greed was impairing his judgment. He was taking life-threatening chances now, and none were in his favor … nor in favor of the men crewing The Swift, whose fates were in the hands of the one man who held sway over the schooner, and his greed, that held sway over his judgment.
       Moses had reminded the skipper that they should be turning back to port for the sake of the men and the catch. They began to quarrel about staying on in Arctic waters beyond the safety margin. He tried, and only God Himself knew how he tried to reason with the skipper, in telling him to act as the good man he was before his judgment totally lost its way. Out on deck, Moses pointed to the shifting ice formations, his voice rising above the wind for all the crew to hear. He pleaded with the skipper about the immediate danger of shifting ice, the risk of the schooner being trapped or crushed, and the threat the men themselves faced if the weather worsened. He warned that all they had worked for … the catch, the vessel, and their own safety … were at stake now, but in God’s hands, appealing to the skipper’s faith … and maybe Lucifer and greed standing on deck, holding hands in trying to keep warm from nature’s grip, and maybe Lucifer thought … a God who made such cold weather did not know the warmth of Hell.

       Moses walked away.
       His hands forming fists.
       His thoughts forming inward.
       The skipper stood alone on deck, but he knew in his heart that Moses was right.
       He called after Moses … but it was lost to the wind.
       It was Moses’s normal practice, when writing or working something out in his mind, to get up at night and stroll around the deck regardless of the weather conditions, smoking his pipe that once belonged to Cain, his mentor, before returning to his hammock and settling down again … eventually catching some sleep before call time for breakfast.

       Well, the story is told that on the morning of the 13th, shortly after three a.m., Moses was up on deck with his blue-covered book in his cold hand, holding it for the comfort it gave him in the written words he jotted down before he went on deck. He thought it was strange … the words coming to him so sure of themselves, but he also knew nothing was strange when he was making notes to himself.

 “Though I did not know who would arrive first,
   I thought of the twins I was yet to meet,

   I thought of how I was to greet,
   Though I did not know who would be cursed or nursed.
  
   The sky turned black, the lightning cracked,
   And nature made a solemn pact,
   The thunder roared a heavy warning,
   To match the cold and breathless morning.
  
   A shadow fell across the deck,
   The cradle swayed without a hand,

   To welcome them to this strange land,
   But in the dark, a final breath,

   The howling storm ushered in Death.”

  

       He remembered those words, but they were just words he had written down before he went on deck. If only he could see himself now, mulling in anguish over words that he wanted to write as a father’s revelation. He was holding the blue-covered book in the same way his grandfather Cain had when he had died. The thought of Cain was as real as if he were before him.
       Why did Moses remember Cain now?

       Why did Moses remember Cain’s deathbed?

       It was the morning after the day he and the skipper had words … words that left the crew uneasy after their talk among themselves. When Moses had turned to face the skipper, not that he had heard him but turned on instinct … everybody heard the skipper saying…

 “I am still skipper of The Swift … and don’t forget it … you may be my cousin Kathleen’s husband, but here, I am your skipper.”

       A sudden gust tore across the deck, flinging ice and spray into the crew’s faces, and, let me tell you, for a moment their world seemed to hold its breath. The biting cold wind coming off the deck was seeping into Moses’s bones now, a pitiless reminder of his own vulnerability against nature, which never once took a mortal’s side, and of his overwhelming anxieties for the pregnant Kathleen back in their cottage. But how fate plays its ways in a relationship when two people are connected by love … and I can tell you something else, that twist that can turn everything on its head is something that makes us mortals … lest we forget.
       Kathleen had her own anxieties that same day. Around midday on the 13th, she was on her back on the floor of the back room in The One-Legged Whaler, with Doc trying to save her life after she gave birth to twin boys. But the undersized ‘blue one’ died with the umbilical cord still attached around his neck … and the other one … well, he was surviving on pipe smoke drifting in from the Men-Only bar.
       Moses cried out Kathleen’s name … and called on Cain to save him now from one man’s greed.
       Moses never felt so alone as he did on that deck of The Swift.

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