Keeping the Harbor Honest

Chapter 1

Around the Point Again

The scale read fourteen pounds and change, and the Cormier girl was already halfway to crying, so Gus called it fifteen and slid her the better price besides.

"Good haul for a slow week," he said, thumbing the ticket flat on the counter before she could look too hard at the number. "You keep setting east of the ledge like your father won't, you'll shame the whole fleet by August."

She laughed, wet, and he pretended not to see her drag her face across the back of her glove.

Behind her the line of totes went down the ramp and onto the float, half the harbor rafted three deep for the Blessing, and every tote out there was going to cross his scale before the light went.

Every skipper hung off the end of one was going to need something from him.

A kinder weight. A loan against next week.

A word, a hand, a lie soft enough to hold till Monday.

Good thing you've got nothing better to do. He rolled his right shoulder, and the shoulder answered the way it always did now — a grind up under the joint, like a winch with sand in the gears. He'd hauled on it thirty-one years. It was allowed an opinion. He didn't have to take it.

He swung the Cormier totes onto the hoist and ran them up, and the hoist motor complained, and under the complaint, from the ice shed, came the sound that had been keeping him up three weeks running. A knock. Deep in the compressor, once every few seconds, patient as something counting down.

"That's getting worse," Gil said, coming up the ramp with a clipboard he wasn't looking at.

"That's getting character," Gus said.

"That's getting a two-thousand-dollar rebuild, is what that's getting, and we haven't got two hundred.

" Gil Levesque was built like a bollard and aged like one too, gone gray and immovable, president of the Merritt Harbor Fishermen's Co-op going on nine years and looking every one of them today.

He stopped at the counter and finally looked at the clipboard, which was the day's buying sheet, which was the same bad news it had been all week.

"Boat price came in again this morning."

"I saw."

"You saw and you're paying the Cormier kid over it."

"I paid the Cormier kid fair," Gus said. "The boat price is what's wrong. Not her."

Gil didn't argue that, because there wasn't any arguing it.

The number on the sheet was the number the dealers down in Portland felt like paying this week, and it had a decimal point in a place that made grown men who'd fished forty years stand on the float and do arithmetic with their lips moving.

Gus had watched three of them do it since noon.

He'd given all three of them a better weight than the scale gave, out of the co-op's margin, which meant out of nothing, which meant he'd make it up somewhere the members couldn't see — the way he'd been making things up somewhere the members couldn't see for the better part of twenty years.

Old Petras Gauthier came up next with a half-tote and an apology already on his face, and Gus took the fish and didn't take the apology, called the weight generous and the man a highliner, and Petras went off down the dock walking two inches taller on a lie that had cost Gus four dollars and would cost him more than that in a month of them.

Worth it. It was always worth it. That was the whole trouble with him. June would have said so, and had.

"You can't feed the fleet out of your own pocket, Auguste," Gil said, which was the only time anybody used his whole name — when they meant to land something.

"Wasn't planning to feed them," Gus said.

"Blessing supper's the Foghorn's. I'm just doing the weighing.

" He nodded down the dock, where Theo Vann had a long table dressed in butcher paper and Rory was working a griddle the size of a hatch cover, the smell of it already halfway across the harbor — frying onions and something with maple in it, the good smell that made the whole waterfront lean toward the co-op like a plant toward a window.

"See? Somebody feeds them. Just not me. I only keep the books. "

"You keep the books like a man doing penance," Gil said. Then, because he heard himself, he softened it, which for Gil meant changing the subject entirely. "If the pound still floated we could hold half of this and tell Portland what to do with their price."

Gus's eyes went, before he could stop them, down the shore.

The pound sat where it had always sat, in the lee of the ledge below the ice shed — or what was left of it did.

A ring of cribwork and float, an acre of harbor fenced off from the rest, built by Gil's grandfather's crew back when the co-op could hold its own catch alive in the water and sell it in December for triple the summer price, when the harbor kept what it caught and waited for the tide of the money to come to it instead of chasing the tide out.

Nobody had kept it up in fifteen years. The cribs were half-sunk, the netting rotted to lace, one whole side of it gone under at high water so that at the top of the tide you couldn't tell there'd ever been anything there at all.

A dead thing. A thing from back when there'd been men enough and money enough to hold instead of sell.

"Pound's gone," Gus said. "Been gone."

"I know it's gone. I'm saying if." Gil shrugged, a heavy man's shrug, and looked at the water. "Man can say if. It's free."

"It's the only thing that is." Gus turned back to the scale before the shore could do anything else to him. "Where's your grandson? Thought he was landing today."

"Landed at four. Ran his own count this year — wouldn't let me touch his sheet.

" And there it was, the one crack of light in Gil's whole gray face, because Petey Levesque running his own boat and his own numbers at nineteen was the single line on the co-op's miserable ledger that came out ahead.

"Better than his grandfather at his age. Don't tell him I said it."

"Wouldn't dream." Gus grinned despite the shore, despite the sheet, despite the shoulder. Some things you couldn't help being glad about. The Levesque kid was one. "He's a captain now. He shouldn't let you touch his sheet. He shouldn't let anybody."

Gil looked at him a beat too long — the look Gus got from men his own age lately, the one that seemed to be checking something on his face, some gauge Gus couldn't see the dial of — and then, mercifully, a boat came in that needed weighing, and Gus turned to the scale, and the shoulder ground, and the ice plant knocked, and the light started to go gold and long the way it did on Blessing evening.

For a while there was nothing to do but the work, which was the only prayer Gus had ever been much good at.

He didn't look at the card on the wall.

It had been there four days, pinned by the pay phone Gil kept alive on the co-op's dime for boats whose radios died — a clean white business card gone slightly curled in the salt, cream stock, a wave embossed in one corner like a thing that had never been near actual water.

HALYARD SEAFOOD GROUP. A name and a cell number under it, in a font that had cost somebody money.

The man who'd left it Tuesday had been soft-spoken and easy and wore boots that had never seen a fish, and he'd stood on Gus's working float and somehow made Gus feel he belonged there less than the visitor did.

We'd love to sit down. No pressure. Just a conversation about what you're all worth down here.

Gus had thanked him, and put the card by the phone, and not called the number. And he had made a point, several times a day since, of not looking at it.

He didn't look at it now.

***

Pastor Gaudet blessed the fleet at seven, the way he had every midsummer of Gus's life, standing at the head of the float in his good jacket with the harbor going pink behind him.

He prayed for the boats and the men on them and the ones the sea had kept, and every skipper took his cap off, and Gus took his off too and turned it slow by the brim while the words went by.

He didn't hear most of them. He never did.

He was too busy counting — heads, mostly, making sure everybody who ought to be here was.

Wyatt Boudreau at the rail with the VHF still clipped to his collar even now, even here, because a harbormaster never quite came off watch, and Elias beside him with a hand at the small of Wyatt's back, the two of them fitted together the way they'd been three years now.

Rory and Theo down at the supper table, Rory scowling at his griddle like it owed him money, Theo laughing at something with a plate in each hand.

Down by the Cyr and Mercer skiff, Roan and Hollis, the drifter that Hollis had hauled out of the harbor two summers back and somehow never let leave.

The whole warm crowded map of who'd stayed and who'd been kept.

The fleet was smaller this year than last, the way it was smaller every year than the last. A boat gone to a bank in Rockland over the winter.

A man gone to Florida to live with a daughter.

The young couple who'd bought the Blue Inn stood down front looking like they were doing sums in their sleep.

Merritt Harbor was a town holding its breath, and had been for as long as Gus had been old enough to notice it holding.

But it was still here. That was the thing he came back to every Blessing, standing at the edge of it with his hat in his hands.

It was still here, and so was he, and as long as both of those stayed true he could keep the second one worth the price of the first. He owed the harbor that much.

He owed it a good deal more than that, and knew exactly to the dollar how much more, and had for twenty years, and the number never got any smaller no matter how many Cormier girls he overpaid or Petras Gauthiers he sent home tall.