Chapter 1 #2
Verne Doucette gave the toast, because Verne had given the toast since before Gus was born and would apparently give it after they were all gone.
Ninety-two, ninety-three — nobody was sure — propped on his cane and his great-nephew's arm, he raised a paper cup of the Foghorn's coffee and said what he said every year.
"To them that stay." He thumped the cane once on the boards, and the whole float thumped and stamped and hollered it back — to them that stay — and it went through Gus the way it always did, half a benediction and half a sentence handed down, and he could never have told you which half he'd earned.
"You're brooding," June Vann said, appearing at his elbow the way she did, small and upright and somehow always exactly where the current in a crowd would set you down.
Eddie's widow. Keeper of every harbor memory worth keeping and a few that weren't. She had a plate in her hand and she put it in his, because that was how June asked after a man — by feeding him before he could decline.
"Sit and eat something before you weigh it. "
"I'm not brooding. I'm supervising."
"You're standing at the edge of your own party counting the house. You do it every year." She patted his arm. "Eddie did it too. It's the same disease, and it's got the same cure, and the cure is a chair."
"Can't. Half the fleet still to weigh."
"The fleet will keep."
"The fleet never keeps," Gus said, as gently as he could, and gave her the smile that ended conversations. She let him have it, because she was kind, and because she was already looking at something over his shoulder — out past the moorings, out where the harbor opened to the point.
"No," June said, quiet, not to him. "But sometimes it sends you something to hold onto anyway. Whether you've got a free hand or not."
So Gus turned to see what she was seeing.
And there it was. Coming around the point.
***
A boat.
Small — smaller than anything that had business out past the ledge alone.
A double-ender, wood, the low sweet peapod shape of a thing built to be rowed off the stern of something bigger and instead built up, decked over, given a stubby mast and a patched tan sail drawing what little evening air there was and no more.
She came in slow and dead straight past the outer can, no engine that Gus could hear, one man at her tiller working her through the mooring field like he'd done it in this harbor a thousand times — which he hadn't, because Gus had never seen the boat or the man in his life.
The float went quiet the way a working waterfront goes quiet: not all at once but in a ripple, one man after another turning to look, because a boat coming in under sail alone at the tail of the Blessing was either a story or a problem and usually both.
"Well," said Dee Pelletier, from somewhere behind Gus's shoulder, in the carrying voice she kept for when she wanted the whole dock to have it. "Would you look at that. Harbor sets the table one night a year, and somebody always smells the supper."
A low laugh went round. But Dee wasn't laughing.
Gus knew her voice too well for that; there was a thing under it, soft, almost tender, the thing she got every single time one of them came around that point tired and alone — as if she'd been sitting up waiting for it.
She had a plate in her hand too. Of course she did.
Down the float by the Cyr and Mercer skiff, Roan Mercer had gone still.
Just stopped, a beer halfway to nowhere, watching the little boat come with a look on his face Gus couldn't read and didn't have time to.
Hollis said something low beside him. Roan didn't answer.
Roan didn't take his eyes off the water.
The peapod rounded up short of the float, neat as you please, her sail spilling, and the man at the tiller stood — lean, tall in the way that reads as thin before it reads as tall, all hard lines, dark hair going gray at the sides under a watch cap gone shapeless with salt.
He didn't wave. He didn't call out for a slip or a mooring or a mechanic.
He put a fender over the side. One. Like a man who owned exactly one fender.
And he looked at the crowded float and the paper table and the whole warm noise of the Blessing with the flat, braced expression of somebody who'd rowed up on a party he had no business at and was already working out the shortest way back out of it.
Gus was down the ramp before he'd decided to be. He was always down the ramp before he'd decided to be — that was the whole trouble with him.
"Line," Gus called, easy, holding up a hand.
The man threw him one without a word — threw it well, a clean underhand coil that dropped into Gus's fist like it had been aimed there — and Gus took a turn on the cleat and snugged the little boat in against the float.
Up close she was worse than she'd looked, and better.
Worse because she was old and tired and mended in a dozen places by a dozen different hands.
Better because every one of those mends was right.
Somebody who knew wood had loved this boat a long way past the point where a sensible man would have stopped.
There was no name on her. Gus noticed it the way he noticed everything on a dock, automatic, filing it.
A working boat, a home boat, a boat mended with that much care — and nothing on the bow, nothing on the quarters, no name anywhere.
Like a dog with no collar. It sat him wrong and he couldn't have said why.
"You're just in time," Gus said, straightening. "We only feed strangers the one night a year, so you timed it good."
The man looked at him. Dark eyes — so dark they read black in the going light — flat, giving up nothing.
The eyes of a man used to being looked at and found wanting, and getting his refusal in first. "I don't need feeding," he said.
His voice came low and rubbed-down and from away — north of away, the long flat vowels of the Maritimes worn thin by years of not talking to anybody.
"Just water, if you can spare it. And I'll pay for it.
I'm not looking to —" He stopped. Glanced at the party, the table, the whole warm mess of it, and something crossed his face and got put away. "I'll be gone with the tide."
"Water's free," Gus said. "Tide won't turn till near midnight, so you've got hours to be rude to me over a plate of food first." He was already reaching back, because Dee had come down the ramp and put a loaded plate in his hand without being asked — because Dee had known before he had.
He held it out. "Rory does a chowder that'll make you sorry you were ever anywhere else.
Eat it standing up if you have to. I won't tell a soul you enjoyed it. "
The man didn't take the plate. He looked at it like it might have a hook in it. "Why," he said. Not quite a question. An accusation, almost — the same shape as Verne's toast.
"Why what?"
"Why would you do that."
Gus had been handing men food on this dock his whole life and not one of them had ever once asked him why, and the question landed somewhere up under his bad shoulder and stuck there.
He covered it the way he covered everything — with the next useful thing.
"Because it's the Blessing, and there's too much of it, and it'll only go to the gulls.
" He pushed the plate an inch closer. "And because you came a long way in a small boat and you did it clean.
I watched you thread that mooring field like you had a chart of it in your head.
Man sails like that, I'll feed him just to keep him where I can ask him how. "
Something moved at the corner of the stranger's mouth. Not a smile — the place a smile would go, on a face that had forgotten the road there. He took the plate.
"Amos," he said, after a second, like it cost him a coin he was short of. "Kean."
"Gus Ouellette." He put his hand out, and Amos Kean shook it — a hard hand, rope-scarred, a couple of knuckles that had been broken and set by nobody, and Gus clocked all of it and filed all of it and let none of it show, because the man was already braced for pity and Gus would sooner have handed him a lit fuse.
"Welcome to Merritt Harbor. Ignore the crowd, they're only like this the once a year.
Rest of the time we're miserable. You'll fit right in. "